Poem for Friday

Waking the Morning Dreamless After Long Sleep
By Jane Hirshfield

But with the sentence:
"Use your failures for paper."
Meaning, I understood,
the backs of failed poems, but also my life.

Whose far side I begin now to enter—

A book imprinted without seeming season,
each blank day bearing on its reverse, in random order,
the mad-set type of another.
December 12, 1960. April 4, 1981. 13th of August, 1974—

Certain words bleed through to the unwritten pages.
To call this memory offers no solace.

"Even in sleep, the heavy millstones turning."

I do not know where the words come from,
what the millstones,
where the turning may lead.

I, a woman forty-five, beginning to gray at the temples,
putting pages of ruined paper
into a basket, pulling them out again.

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One more Jane Hirshfield poem because I did some of that sort of organizing and it's never fun (and how come I'm graying at the temples five years earlier than she was?) I started tagging all the poetry in my journal, but it's four years' worth and I can't remember which writers I posted so many times they should have their own tags versus which I should include in more general categories like "victorian poetry," "feminist poetry" etc.

There was a thunderstorm warning and tornado watch in my county for half the day, so rather than brave the weather, I stayed home. Finished my review of The Prestige which I then realized probably won't run for three weeks since the film editor at GMR (aka ) is out of town for her birthday, wrote up a ridiculous number of news bullets for TrekToday and threw out even more since the events they were about had already taken place...we need dynamic news bullets like TrekWeb has, particularly since they tend to bullet all of our news and we tend to bullet all of theirs. Younger son has a spelling test Friday so when he came home I tested him on that and we read together for awhile; older son had Shakespeare Club and his bus was late, so picked up pizza after picking up son.


Stephen the squirrel hung out above the sliding doors to the deck trying to keep dry.


Being a landlubber, he is not pleased by storms at sea.


Then Rosie became aware of the situation. And soon there were two cats frantic to do something about it.


A little birdie huddled on the bird feeder during a torrential downpour, seen through my fogged-up window.


Eventually, the rain let up some...


...and the sky started to clear...


...but by the time it had stopped raining enough that I could go out with a camera, the rainbow had mostly faded.

Had a too-much-television evening: first the end of The Da Vinci Code, which I adore because they go from Temple Church to Westminster Abbey with side visits to Docklands, Rosslyn Chapel and the Louvre (the architectural descriptions were my favorite things about that book and Angels and Demons). Then Smallville, which felt overlong to me -- a combination of too little Lionel, absolutely no Lois or Martha, FAR too much Lana, and Jimmy still not convincing me that Chloe would fall for him. Having recently watched "Wink of an Eye," the Star Trek episode in which Captain Kirk is accelerated, we were all laughing that Lex was a Scalosian and needed Spock to bring him the antidote. Meanwhile Clark was off in a Threshold ripoff -- evil aliens suck the bones out of people on a ship and then on dry land, only it turns out there's a super-alien as well as the WWE alien. I am still not terribly happy about the extent of Jimmy's aw-shucksness, which I realize is canon but I'm unconvinced that Chloe would be so charmed by this. As a guy to date for the summer, fine, but as a full-time boyfriend who defensively compares himself to Clark? Not so much.

However, the Chloe/Jimmy relationship is a dream compared to the train wreck that is Lex and Lana. At least Lionel, who knows full well what a bimbo Lana is, never tells her anything even when she throws a tantrum. How did the delusional frequency-shifting guy know about the secret experimental floor at all if he was never there, even if Lionel cleared out the project after he escaped, hmm? Lana of course won't take word of a homicidal maniac over the homicidal maniac she lives with. (I was reciting, "I'm pregnant, I'm not an invalid" right along with her, which cracked my kids up -- could they make her any more predictable!) Please, can she have the Inevitable Sweeps Month Miscarriage or Demon Baby very soon, then go to college in another city...or better yet, on another show that I don't watch?

After Smallville came "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield," which I tend to think of as one of the really good third season episodes -- it has a strong social message and The Riddler -- but it also seemed kind of slow and didactic, and Kirk's responses seemed very forced (maybe because of stupid close-up shots of the red alerts and the endless self-destruct sequence that would have provided ample time for a Borg cube to warp in, assimilate the entire crew and leave before the ship blew up, had the Borg been around). And I kept reciting The Sneetches with stars upon thars which did not make it easier to take things any seriously.

Finally, after the kids had gone to bed, we watched Shark, which was quite enjoyable even after it got predictable. I love the father-daughter stuff -- Stark telling Julie that he really does want to know all the things he keeps telling her he doesn't want to know -- and I liked seeing the actress who played Mackenzie Allen's daughter on Commander in Chief again, and although they definitely played the lesbian storyline for as much skanky TV impact as possible -- look, teenage girls in bikinis kissing each other! -- but I thought they did a nice job with the lesbian feeling so guilty about who she was that she was less afraid of jail than telling her mother and friends the truth. I also liked Raini snarking at Madeline about whether Madeline was going to have sex with everyone in the office by the end of the year, meaning all the guys, and Madeline asking whether that was an invitation! Whoo! Okay, I am in no position to be critical of cheap network lesbian titillation.

In my ongoing Paramount-CBS love, I am interviewing George Takei in conjunction with the release of the animated Star Trek. Any good questions for him? *g*