Poem for Thursday

Night Garden
By Anne Michaels

Your mouth, a hand
against my mouth.
Pressed to earth, we dream
of ocean: heat-soaked, washed
with exhaustion, our mariner's sleep
haunted by smells of garden--fresh rosemary
thirty miles off Spain. Long grasses
sway the bottom of our boat.
We follow a sequence
of scents complex as music,
navigate earth places, sea places, follow
acoustics of mountains,
warbler instinct in the dark--
Siberia, Africa, and back--
phosphor runways guiding us to shore,
moonlight half eaten by the waves.

Across the lawn, a lit window floats.
Welts of lupine. You remember
an open window, Arabian music
through wet beeches. We know we're moving
at tremendous speed, that if it could be seen
the stars would be a smear
of velocity. But all is still,
pinioned. In the night garden,
light is a swallowed cry.
Naked in the middle of the city
the stars grow firm in our mouths

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I went out to lunch with for her birthday, except I left her birthday present sitting at home on my dining room table. We managed to eat Mexican food anyway, and shop at Target and Bath & Body Works and discuss what we liked about Movie 5 and the insanity surrounding Book 7. I see that the Baltimore Sun has published an advance review with a major spoiler...is someone going to get sacked for that? And is everyone on LJ going to unfriend the Baltimore Sun? ETA: Oh, now I hear it's a legitimate copy that Deep Discount shipped a week early! Someone is not only going to get sacked but sued!

Picked up the kids from camp and lost part of the late afternoon to an incipient migraine (time of month and weather front converging...head feels miserable), woke up and decided I don't really like the shirt I bought at Target and can't decide whether I like the skort enough to keep...it was only $15, but if I'm going back to return the shirt I could always bring it back too. Wrote a medium-boring article on Nicholas Meyer reflecting on The Wrath of Khan and a painful article on Susan Sackett trying to cash in on her relationship with Gene Roddenberry, which I hope I managed to strip down to stuff that is actually relevant to Star Trek. Then we watched the BBC's Midsummer Night's Dream with Helen Mirren as Titania and Robert Lindsay as Lysander...the whole cast is terrific, but those two in particular.
















I'm going to see Vienna Teng as an anniversary present! *bounces* But what is with Firefox? Ever since they installed that update last night it moves at the speed of molasses, and I even updated Java. Well, shall hope it works well enough to post a squeeful Vienna report tomorrow!