A Litany
By Gregory Orr
I remember him falling beside me,
the dark stain already seeping across his parka hood.
I remember screaming and running the half mile to our house.
I remember hiding in my room.
I remember that it was hard to breathe
and that I kept the door shut in terror that someone would enter.
I remember pressing my knuckles into my eyes.
I remember looking out the window once
at where an ambulance had backed up
over the lawn to the front door.
I remember someone hung from a tree near the barn
the deer we'd killed just before I shot my brother.
I remember toward evening someone came with soup.
I slurped it down, unable to look up.
In the bowl, among the vegetable chunks,
pale shapes of the alphabet bobbed at random
or lay in the shallow spoon.
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I spent the entire morning reading The Prestige, which I think I actually admired more in the end than the film, though it would be hard for me to say which I liked better because the film gave me a visual and thematic context for so many things in the novel. (I am very glad that I didn't read it before I saw the movie, as I think the way certain surprises were revealed in the movie had a greater impact than in the book, though I found Angier more sympathetic in the novel and absolutely thrilled to the "scientific" description of how certain magical effects were produced.)
The downside of having spent all morning reading is that I don't have my new glasses yet -- I am, in fact, picking them up tomorrow -- and I ended up with a monster headache that took multiple drugs and the entire afternoon to get rid of, since I was schlepping younger son to violin (which was a nightmare today...am in need of a new violin teacher for an advanced beginner student, someone who does not stop to talk to her kids, answer the phone, etc. in the middle of lessons; I realize this may not matter with older students but with my easily distractible child, it's turning into a disaster no matter how "good" a teacher she is reputed to be).
...through the windshield driving across Frederick County...
...and surrounding Ceres-Bethel AME Church and its cemetery.
Have just seen the trailer for A Good Year again and remembered that the little boy from Finding Neverland and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory grows up to be Russell Crowe. This pleases me. *g* Trek news was a rumor, undoubtedly completely false, that Tom Cruise asked J.J. Abrams for a cameo in Star Trek XI (though false, the rumor still might have come from Camp Cruise which apparently will do anything to keep his name in the news), and Patrick Stewart being a Detroit fan. Too bad the Series was a washout.
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