Poem for Thursday

Travelers in Erewhon
By Kenneth Rexroth

You open your
Dress on the dusty
Bed where no one
Has slept for years
An owl moans on the roof
You say
My dear my
Dear
In the smoky light of the old
Oil lamp your shoulders
Belly breasts buttocks
Are all like peach blossoms
Huge stars far away far apart
Outside the cracked window pane
Immense immortal animals
Each one only an eye
Watch
You open your body
No end to the night
No end to the forest
House abandoned for a lifetime
In the forest in the night
No one will ever come
To the house
Alone
In the black world
In the country of eyes

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If you can’t fix it, you gotta stand it. Let's just leave this week at that. I can't talk about it, I can't do anything about it and I suck at pretending nothing's wrong so I am just avoiding people, for which I apologize, as I am very, very grateful for the good vibes. Had a silly irrelevant morning sorting coupons and stuff uncovered in the Great CD Disaster, a calm afternoon taking younger son to violin and overseeing everyone's homework along with illicit attempts to eat Trix cereal, since we have much too much in the house, having bought boxes so younger son could attempt to collect Happy Feet penguin figures that our local supermarket seems only to have in sweetened cereals. On which note, have some warm fuzzies:


Asian otters in their new habitat at the National Zoo.


There are domestic otters near the beavers, but these are smaller and equally adorable.


I should have brought a tripod, as these photos were taken with a telephoto from quite a distance, but I hate having to lug it up all the hills!


The red pandas, however, were not cooperating in posing anyway.

I watched The Constant Gardener, which I had not seen before, and although I had expected it to be good, I had not expected to be so totally engrossed in it...some people had said it got a little bit politically mired near the end, throwing all the Sudanese stuff on top of the Kenyan stuff, and I can see that but I still thought it was very effective and powerful and Fiennes and Weisz were both stellar -- as were Danny Huston, Pete Postlethwaite, Richard McCabe and the very creepy Bill Nighy. I think really good movies about huge global problems are a better distraction than fluff in some ways, though it made me angry and wishing I spent more time getting off my ass and doing things the way Tessa did in the movie after she read stuff that made her angry on the internet instead of just ranting about it. Though I'm feeling sort of tired and resigned and think I am just going to go back to blathering about stupid stuff tomorrow because I don't really see what else I can do except make myself miserable, which would be stupid, and figure out how to save the world next month.