Poem for Tuesday

Common-Law Kundalini
By Rodney Jones

A sudden loving settles into your own weight...
click, then roll over onto your back
and you are there above yourself,

the human spirit in full cloud-drift,
a lust fieldstripped to eye and ambition
which moves through walls and doors

and rises to the carnival of looking down
with no power but that of seeing
all of it momentarily unchangeable:

the shadow-tinseled moonlit fields
and silvery water towers on stilts,
the vole in the unblinking talon of the owl.

Even better, asleep, in dream-buoyancy,
I have seen more than I ever saw
pretzel-munching in some cloud valley

thirty thousand feet above the sorghum.
Once a pelican stopped to question me.
Once my friend Herbert McAbee

bumped into me out of the mist
with a talking sheep under his arm.
Often I have achieved much in basketball,

for many dream flights launched
from the magic floor of some actual gym
where old men smoked by a potbellied stove,

but removed from time, unblocked,
and watched by sweethearts, cheered,
I rose and dunked and hovered

with fear's iodine in my throat.
When I am up there, it is not poetry.
In the dream's onliness, it feels

wingless, bird-elegant, experimental,
requiring the decisionless decision-
making of dreams. But somehow,

why do I do this if not for the freedom?
Sometimes I wish I had never heard
of the name of Sigmund Freud.

--------

Yet another by Jones, well-liked by Robert Pinsky in Sunday's Poet's Choice in The Washington Post Book World. "Walt Whitman proclaims, near the end of his 'Song of Myself,' 'I contain multitudes.' In an opposite or complementary way, Rodney Jones wonders aloud about what it means to be or feel part of a multitude."

I have had a very lovely day with and my children, whose presence limited our porn-writing adult conversation but did not stop us from having lunch at Tara Thai and going to see Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (her first time; my, um, fifth). Okay, I might as well confess, since I said it to her: I think Barbossa is the hottest man in that movie and in many ways I also think he and Elizabeth are perfect for each other, even if (or perhaps because) he's pretty much the only man in the movie who does not try to kiss her...which, okay, is probably an even bigger indication that he prefers men than the fact that he can't figure out how to speak to Calypso as a lover, but I'm betting that as a pirate he's also probably flexible.

And, you know, I could go for Barbossa/Jack, Barbossa/Norrington, Barbossa/Sao Feng, Barbossa/Tia Dalma, Barbossa/Teague and particularly Barbossa/Bill Turner, though I don't think I could deal with Barbossa/Davy Jones. Though I also really, really want to know the backstory we never got on Jack and Beckett ("We've each left our mark on the other," as Beckett said in Dead Man's Chest -- someone told me she thought this was covered in one of those Young Jack Sparrow novels but I can't bear to look at those, I want a proper answer like "It's the one Jack left with his teeth on Beckett's inner thigh"). Um, did I say that? *whistles* Anyway, -- who also brought me Tarot decks, whee! -- and my children and I also saw...


...the baby geese of a couple of weeks ago, only slightly bigger!


They were munching the grass right in front of the Mexican restaurant.


It appears to be the same mixed family, though the little yellow fuzzy gosling is smaller than the Canada goslings. I don't know whether that is always the case or just with this baby, or whether they are not actually siblings but part of a babysitting collective.


The darker gosling has orange feet, which makes me believe it's probably a hybrid.


We also saw the older adolescent goslings, which were definitely in a babysitting collective with several adults.


They are almost as tall as the grownup geese but they still have more brown feathers than the iridescent black and blue on their necks and tails.


People were throwing bread crumbs to some of the geese and ducks, but this heron settled itself just where the crumbs were falling and pecked the other birds away even though it did not appear to want the bread for itself -- probably it was hoping fish would surface. Later it flew across the lake and pecked the geese out of its way there, too!

And on the subject of birds, sent me the Chicago Tribune article on how giant penguins may once have roamed in Peru, and sent me the illustrated Discovery Channel version! It's probably a good thing the penguins are extinct or my son would want to move to Peru to get one as a pet.