Poem for Tuesday

25.December.2000
By Ken Rumble

Portuguese widows
on 18th in
Adams Morgan
knit their own dark
shawls. Let me spin you
a yarn
I say
there's only one
story:
yours.

--------

From the new book Key Bridge because I was downtown today and was in the mood for a DC poem. I went with and , where, after we had lunch at the Hard Rock Cafe, we met up with and to see Snow Cake, which has a great trailer that can be viewed here, though I might have gone anyway because it has Alan Rickman and Sigourney Weaver, plus Carrie-Anne Moss and (to the approval of the others though I hadn't known before I saw it) Callum Keith Rennie. It's one of Rickman's better roles -- a completely closed-off man who meets an autistic woman under really terrible circumstances and gets some perspective on his own tragedies. Weaver is terrific, less mannered than Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, and really fearless about finding the humor in the role without making it laughable. and I debated which scene was more enjoyable, Rickman in a woman's bathrobe or Rickman trying to explain to Moss that he's glad she's not a hooker because he can't afford to keep seeing her if she is. He's marvelous at being sad and very lovely when he's happy.

Came home with attempting to stop me from navigating us off the map (I only got moderately lost, which is good for me...at least there was no traffic). Did a quick skim of the news, can't wait for someone to bring Microsoft down now that they are taking on the free world, am pleased to see a Mexican sinkhole may help with a NASA Jupiter mission, watched Heroes which mostly rocked with the exception of my boredom with the Good Father/Bad Mother paradigm set up in full force last week and continued. Yeah, Nathan, I bet your father is your hero and he would be sooo proud of you. I do love that not Sylar but Bennett is Molly's bogeyman! And I'm not sorry that Hiro's father is a good guy after all, though I'm not entirely sure what he thinks he's training his son to do -- if he wants to stop Sylar and he knows so much, how come he isn't trying to take out Linderman?

And am I the only one who was screaming, "KILL HIM!" at the TV when Nathan was blowing Hiro off, since a dead Nathan would make it impossible for Sylar to take his brain and...oh wait, Linderman would just raise Nathan from the dead. If he can raise himself from the dead. Since I'm not sure about the extent of his powers. There's a definite money-and-power as the root of all evil theme building, with Linderman assuming he can buy everyone from Micah on up, but there's also some bizarre genetics/social darwinism where we're supposed to deplore Linderman's breeding project that produced Micah and possibly Claire, yet find it cool that Hiro is descended from famous Samurai and a wealthy CEO. It took me till this week when Bennett started talking about the tracking system to go, aha, he means Molly, but he doesn't know he means Molly, and then I was sure he was not going to kill her. Though for a minute when he burst through that door, I thought he might, to protect Claire.

Thank goodness for Niki/Jessica, because did I mention how sick I am of all the admirable fathers and absent or just plain wrong mothers? And I do love DL, refusing to believe that his relationship with Niki was less than real, so willing to die for his wife and son. But since I'm complaining, I might as well mention how irritated I was when Evil Shapeshifter Mother Figure, in the course of explaining to Micah that the world is a dark and terrible place, presents him with the first issue of Silver Surfer and my whole family together said "Product Placement!" only to get the confirmation, in a commercial minutes later, that indeed Heroes is cross-promoting the Fantastic Four sequel. That completely throws me out of the universe and makes it all seem pretty trivial.


Inside the vast National Building Museum, the massive marble pillars...


...and the fountain in the central courtyard area.


Outside the building museum (the road was closed for the candlelight vigil for National Police Week...we passed easily 100 officers from all over the country on the way to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial).


The Spy Museum is diagonally across the street from the National Portrait Gallery.


Both of them are a block away from the MCI Center, which can be seen in reflection in these windows...can you imagine having the job of washing this building?


And from today at the Hard Rock Cafe on E Street, an autographed Radiohead guitar.

Weekend laundry still has not been folded. I know what I'm doing Tuesday apart from work.