Poem for Tuesday

Eating the Peach
By Henri Cole

Eating the peach, I feel like a murderer.
Time and darkness mean nothing to me,
moving forward and back with my white enameled teeth
and bloated tongue sating themselves on moist,
pulpy flesh. When I suck at the pit that resembles
a small mammal's skull, it erases all memory
of trouble and strife, of loneliness and the blindings
of erotic love, and of the blueprint of a world,
in which man, hater of reason, cannot make
things right again. Eating the peach, I feel the long
wandering, my human hand -- once fin and paw --
reaching through and across the allegory of Eden,
mud, boredom and disease, to bees, solitude
and a thousand hairs of grass blowing by chill waters.

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As much as I admire the bleakness of this poem, I will never again be able to think of a peach without also thinking of the scene in Andre Aciman's Call Me By Your Name in which a pair of boys deflower one in a glorious and life-affirming manner.

Despite missing Shore Leave (and , waah...hope you got home safe and sound!), I persuaded to come to the disaster area that is my house, luring her with promises of Star Trek books and Shatner gossip. Which we had in abudance. We went out for Thai food and I ate far more than I needed to but it was worth it! (, we tried to track you down and drag you along -- will see you very soon though!) In my haste to keep her safe from my cats -- how come cats seem to have an unerring instinct for when someone is allergic to them and seek maximum contact? -- I forgot to give her a Captain Kirk puzzle book, so she will have to come back after next Shore Leave.

The kids apparently had a good time at camp -- younger son, who had sworn off soccer after the season ended, played it for half the day, and older son scored a goal so was quite pleased with himself. I fought for awhile with StarTrek.com to download the new commentary to the director's cut of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, only to discover I couldn't tell which of the commentators was talking when. Watched Tootsie while folding laundry -- talk about a guilty pleasure, but I still love that movie -- and received lots of assistance, as shown below.


My mother bought me the shirt beneath Rosie, a nightshirt version of this:


So of course when I walked away for a minute in the middle of folding laundry, Rosie decided she needed to sleep on it.


Of course, Rosie does not limit her sleeping activities to laundry. Here she is using 's leg as a pillow.


Cinnamon chooses the conventional folded-afghan-on-the-couch, folded-paw-over-the-face pose.


And in a dire emergency, even a bed will do for a nap, though there is often some dispute about which cat got there first.

I'm so sad about British courtroom wigs, though of course that is easy to say as I neither have to buy nor wear one. And does Rosie swearing that she will not appear on The Apprentice in this lifetime or the next mean that she's already under contract and now the publicity begins?