Poem for Wednesday

Alba: Innocence
By Carl Phillips

Sunday. The bells, as expected. I cannot
help it if I rise, if finding the room too
fraught with light—all of it, the white
walls, the rinsed notion (always almost

inside then just out of reach) of God, your
body gleaming in sleep where the sun falls
on it and away from, falls on and away—
I have to shut my one good eye and at once

the leaves falling but now blurred make it
possible to see how it happens, a bruise
lifting itself over time from the darker
blues to, slowly, something like amber,

to at last whatever, before the wounding,
the flesh was. Imagining the flesh before
or without knowledge, I want to say it is
most like song untrained, whose beauty,

when it occurs, surprises even itself—
but isn’t it also, more commonly, just
meat, or isn’t it good soil waiting, that
does not, cannot know that it is waiting?

Therefore, it is innocence. Therefore,
a capacity for suffering more vast, even,
than the landscape whose particulars, you
remember, we drove past, the red of sunset

upon them: the bull in mid-lumbering over
the cow (still with patience, with fear?),
almost, not yet inside her; the sudden
bursting of crows, all cinders flying over

where once, presumably, was some small life.
We were tired, hungry, faintly hungry for
each other. We kept driving: east, home,
toward a dark we couldn’t fast enough get to.

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We're off to my in-laws for the July 4th holiday on Wednesday morning, so most of Tuesday was spent doing chores in preparation. Older son spent the morning at a friend's house while younger son played with friends around here, then my father took both boys to the pool while I folded laundry. Thelma and Louise was on On Demand and I wanted to record it, so even though I have very mixed feelings about that movie, I watched it. It used to infuriate me -- there's something wrong with a movie that suggests it's more positive for women to leap off the planet than try to make the system work for them (I've read academic analysis about how they're free as birds at the end because we never see gravity take effect, but I think that's crap; it's Butch and Sundance running into the hail of bullets and the picture freezing). Now it just makes me sad. I can't even smile when they blow up the truck. Though wow, Geena Davis is gorgeous -- sometimes I forget.

Wrote articles on how ILM is doing the Star Trek XI special effects (no big surprise there) and how Dominic Keating will be a regular next season on Heroes...either someone there is a big Trekkie or Keating had a great audition, as he's playing an Irish mobster, according to Variety. Well, if they could have Christopher Eccleston then they can have more Star Trek alumni than George Takei! Speaking of whom, we watched a bit of "Dalek" because younger son and I were trying to remember exactly what was current Who canon on how the Daleks were made. Then we put on Wargames which we also wanted to record while it was On Demand, though I only saw the very end; it's held up extremely well given the dearth of special effects ("the only winning move is not to play") and it has John Spencer.


The national park surrounding the historic Jamestown excavation is surrounded by wetlands. Here is one of the local inhabitants among the weeds.


This marker commemorates the original Virginia Company.


Here is the remaining church, which houses these plaques and what's left of the original church on the site.


Nearby are the remains of the New World's first blown-glass factory.


Glassmakers now work on the site and give demonstrations.

I see George II is now threatening hinting at a full pardon later in his term when there will be fewer political consequences. Happy freakin' independence day and good luck finding the Constitution...