Poem for Tuesday

Hunt
By Meghan O'Rourke

The light of the mind is red. It is a red street,
it never ends, it must be kept to
like a schedule. When it is fine, it is fine,

and the night's hounds flinch from it.
Foxes run under dark cover of leaves;
the glacier, trapping everything unused, melts.

Everything natural to us must be learned.
The broken laugh, the branching glance,
the wood beneath the green, embarking skin.

The light of the mind is red. It is a red street,
and a cold home stands at its darkening end,
toward which foxes run through clicking leaves.

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Another from Poet's Choice in Sunday's Washington Post Book World, "Hunt" reminded Robert Pinsky of Wallace Stevens in its energy and "images that in a similar way are familiar, yet disrupt trite expectations...these poems, old and new, share an alert sense of the mind and the mind's quick, invisible, pervasive movement."

Thanks for the condolences about Ginger...we're all pretty sad, though I wouldn't say we're upset exactly...we had a feeling this was coming the last time we visited my in-laws and saw that the dog could barely walk anymore. I actually had quite a nice morning, as came to visit and while we were trying to decide whether to go to Great Falls or eat lunch out, she mentioned that she had never seen Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, which made "what should we do today" a no-brainer. I called a friend to ask whether my younger son could go home with her son for a little while, called the school to have them tell son to go to her house and took off for the movies.

It's funny -- I have total, absolute, unreserved love for this movie, in a way that I did not for the first two even though I think the first one is better edited and the acting in all three is delightful (yes, Orlando Bloom too -- it's not his fault if his character is written as the straight man). I don't think I realized how essential Barbossa was to my enjoyment of the first until he returned in the third, but the third movie in particular is Elizabeth's story and I love watching her come into her own, her entire arc, even the ending which I find really appropriate and not a downer. Came home, wrote brief articles on the Tony Awards and how George Takei is doing a bit part in a smutty teen movie in New Orleans for his summer vacation, entertained three boys, had dinner, not a bad afternoon either except for being sad.


On the other side of the lake at the Rio shopping center from the babies from yesterday, there was a crowd of ten adolescent Canada Geese and four adults.


We first saw them swimming from around the side of the lake...


...and by the time we got around the lake, they were coming out of the water.


Most of them had adult tail feathers and the beginnings of wing feathers, but still a lot of brown downy fuzz.


This is the domestic goose that seems to be a part of this family, as it was with the crowd last time we saw them as younger goslings. Because it has that dark mark on its neck, I am pretty sure it is one of these geese...a mixed-breed family from two years ago.


It's a different kind of cute than the babies but still adorable.

In the evening I put on what I got in the mail...I had ordered the special edition of Field of Dreams from Deep Discount DVD's big summer sale, because I have unreserved love for it (yes, Kevin Costner too) and although I had bought it on VHS and recorded it off cable, I needed the DVD which comes with several specials that I have not watched yet plus deleted scenes, which I have! Lots of new scenes in various states of finish (the one at Fenway looks very clean, the one in the garden looks like it was in a rubbish bin). More Amy Madigan and more James Earl Jones! And a bit more of Archie and the metaphysics of "going out," and Annie saying that Ray's agnostic, which wasn't entirely clear before. I didn't inherit my father's love of baseball on a game-to-game basis but I completely relate to American generational myth of the sport. (They were just showing Mets highlights on the news and there were seagulls on the field that would not go away until the pitcher chased them...hee!) Of course the movie made me cry, but it always does. Sigh.

Eee, Yahoo! has the American Gangster trailer! And I still haven't managed to catch Russell on American Chopper with his motorcycles!