Poem for Wednesday

Good News
By Linda Gregerson

1.
The hobbled, the halt, the hasten-to-blame-it-on-
    childhood
    crowd, the undermined and over-

their-heads, the hapless,
    the humbugs,
    the hassle-me-nots. The night

before the night my uncle Jens
    saw Jesus
    standing in the hayloft, he -

my uncle Jens, that is - considered
    cashing the whole
    thing in. Bettina gone

the way she had, the boys all gone
    to hell . . .
    The mild flat light of evening lay

like a balm on the fields. But for his heart
    no balm
    in sight. So Jens

gave all his money to the local charis-
    matic,
    and in exchange his fellow faithful told him

to forgive himself. God's god-
    forsaken children
    all over the suburbs and the country-

side are dying in the service
    of a market
    share. Witness

the redhead I used to go to college with,
    who played
    the trombone and studied Kant and now

performs the laying on of hands somewhere
    in eastern
    Tennessee. Beneath her touch

quenched sight returns, the myelin sheath
    repairs
    and lets the wheelchair rust, the cancerous

cat comes purring back to health.
    But Jens,
    whose otherworldliness imperfectly

cohered, took to driving his pickup
    off the road,
    in desultory fashion for the most part,

so that cousin Ollie's cornfield took
    the brunt
    of harm. The hens

ran loose. And Jens, who in his mother's arms
    had leapt
    for joy and in tow-headed youth had leapt
to favor in each tender heart, went weary
    to salvation.


2.
Having learned from a well-meaning neighbor
    that death
    will not have her if Jesus

does first, my three-year-old daughter
    is scouring
    the visible world for a sign.

The other she's found in abundance -
    death on her
    dinnerplate, death in the grass -

and drawing just conclusions is beside herself
    with fear.
    "Most Englishmen,"

the Archbishop said smoothly, "are still residual
    Christians.
    We still need a clergy for funerals."

The televangelist's plexiglass pulpit,
    the crystal veil
    of his tears, assure us the soul is

transparent too. No stone can break
    nor scandal mar
    the radiant flow of video con-

version. Close now, closer
    than audio
    enhancement, the frictionless

story that washes us clean.
    Words dis-
    encumbered of contingency,

of history, of doubt. God's
    wounds,
    they swore, the old ones,

the believers, as now we swear by sex or shit.
    God's wounds,
    which failures of attention made.

--------

I had kind of a lazy day. Was supposed to have lunch with , but we both agreed a bit before noon that we were too disorganized and postponed. Ran out to CVS and the Hallmark store to get birthday cards and other necessities (being Jewish, I certainly did not buy the Cauldron Trouble Ornament, I mean, I would never have a tree and I stopped collecting the Star Trek ornaments and oh look isn't that cute hanging over my computer?). Wrote an article on Kate Mulgrew's rave reviews in Iphigenia 2.0 which I would love to see and might even try to get up to New York to see if it was anyone other than, you know, Kate Mulgrew. Oh, and I forgot to mention that I got to write up a fun interview with Jonathan Frakes, who is always so lovely and unpretentious in interviews, and who is now living in Maine and teaching college film and is just very high on my "celebrities with their priorities straight" list.

My really fun article today was reviewing the Star Trek: New Voyages episode "World Enough and Time" -- I can't link to the episode because the web site is currently having big problems, but they had sent me a review copy on DVD and the first amazing thing about it is that on DVD, this episode looks more professional than 3/4 of professional Star Trek. Whoever has been doing the crappy special effects for the Trek video games should hire this team. On top of that, it's a well-told story, absolute classic original Trek (derivative of several episodes but who cares, so were a lot of TNG and Voyager), with a lovely performance by George Takei and surprisingly good camera work including an overhead shot of the bridge. My kids, who quite often got bored particularly with the original series' third season, watched the entire thing quite enthusiastically. I'm really impressed.


The lighthouse of historic Lewes, Delaware...


...and the replica of it as one drives into the town (taken through the windshield, sorry about the blur).


Here is the long view of the horizon with the lighthouse along with a World War II defense tower, taken from the top of another tower.


And here is the Kalmar Nyckel berthed at the Cape May-Lewes Ferry Terminal Dock.

Summer vacation is over! I'm entitled to beach nostalgia. *g*