Poem for Friday

Great Sleeps I Have Known
By Robin Becker

Once in a cradle in Norway folded
like Odin's eight-legged horse Sleipnir
as a ship in full sail transported the dead to Valhalla

Once on a mountain in Taos after making love
in my thirties the decade of turquoise and silver

After your brother walked into the Atlantic
to scatter your mothers ashes his khakis soaked
to the knees his shirtsleeves blowing

At the top of the cottage in a thunderstorm
once or twice each summer covetous of my solitude

Immediately following lunch
against circadian rhythms, once
in a bunk bed in a dormitory in the White Mountains

Once in a hollow tree in Wyoming
A snow squall blew in the guide said tie up your horses

The last night in the Katmandu guest house
where I saw a bird fly from a monk's mouth
a consolidated sleep of East and West

Once on a horsehair mattress two feet thick
I woke up singing
as in the apocryphal story of my birth
at Temple University Hospital

On the mesa with the burrowing owls
on the mesa with the prairie dogs

Willing to be lucky
I ran the perimeter road in my sleep
entrained to the cycles of light and dark
Sometimes my dead sister visited my dreams

Once on the beach in New Jersey
after the turtles deposited their eggs
before my parents grew old, nocturnal

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I had a really good lunch with at La Madeleine -- half a turkey sandwich on croissant, pasta salad, a cup of tomato bisque soup, and then she got too full to eat her chocolate cream puff so in the interests of being a good friend and preventing wastefulness I very graciously agreed to eat it for her. *g* It's hard for a day to improve after that, but we walked down to Toys R Us (no Titanic Barbie, sadly) and then went to look for book covers for our kids at A.C. Moore, where the Spookytown line of Halloween decorations are on sale this week, and I had to have the witches at the stone circle! I really need to put up shelves for my Halloween decorations; right now they get displayed on the countertop in the downstairs bathroom, which is silly.

Trek news was confirmation that Anton Yelchin will play Chekov, which is very cool as far as I'm concerned because he's the son of champion Soviet ice skaters who were denied a spot on the 1972 Olympic team because they're Jewish, so they emigrated to the US and he grew up here. Almost as cool, a rumor that Zoe Saldana aka Anamaria from Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl may play Uhura, which would be awesome assuming they gave her more to do than open hailing frequencies. Apparently there's a rumor going around that the plot is a sort of variation on Della Van Hise's Killing Time (regrettably without all the K/S) in which adult Spock, played by Nimoy, must try to stop the Romulans from changing history by protecting young Kirk -- this would mean Nimoy had a big role in the movie, which I favor, but also means they could completely reboot canon, which I am not in favor of at all. So hopefully this is mostly incorrect.


This is usually Rosie's favorite position in which to spend the evening.


Unless there is something very exciting going on upstairs like laundry being folded, in which case she occasionally deigns to share the bed with Cinnamon.


But when she sees a katydid out the back window at night...


...or a cicada out the front window during the day...


...it is necessary to sit by the window and glare and occasionally try to attack the glass.

I know I have already linked to one Onion article in the past week, and I very nearly linked to the one about the director who was, shockingly, staging The Merchant of Venice in Renaissance Italy, but this one, though old, made me howl so much that I have to share: "New Oliver Stone 9/11 Film Introduces 'Single Plane' Theory". Because sometimes you have to laugh so you don't cry, you know?