Poem for Wednesday

Night Crabbing
By James Hoch

Touching, we say, when something’s
close, less weighty, lying in bed, telling

again our summers spent watching
Mother as she showed us how to hold

blue claws by the lower appendages
and stroke their bellies calmly

working their bodies into a trance.
Sleeping, she called it, though

we knew what the lines meant:
wide V-shapes, arrow studs.

Crouched on a gray dock, it was
a way of freeing a net’s nylon twine,

a bunker’s head, leaving our hands
intact, as we measured, point to point,

ones we would carry home against
ones thrown back charmed, falling.

Above a black pot, it was small
mercy, arousal from a child’s finger

coaxing them limp, drifting, as if
in our hands it dreamt of water.

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My Tuesday started with many people e-mailing to ask me whether I had heard that Patrick Stewart would be joining David Tennant in Hamlet next year at the RSC, thus overriding article #593 on Zachary Quinto being grateful to have been cast -- thank you very much everyone who sent links and spared me even if I must now weep with envy of everyone who gets to go. Before I got around to writing for TrekToday, however, I had the pleasure of meeting and having lunch with , who is in my state visiting her mother. We went to Legal Seafood where she had crab cakes and I had rasam soup and then we went and got some UK Cadbury and came back to my house and watched ancient Voyager songvids, thus dating both of us...though me far more than her, since she was apparently barely a teenager when we met on America Online during that show's run.

After dinner, the kids wanted to put on Don Juan & Miguel's DVD The Lost Princess, starring Don Juan's daughter Esmerelda as the titular character and Don Juan and Miguel gallivanting through the countryside flirting with nuns and singing with Renaissance minstrels. The DVD came with a recording of The Weird Show from the Arizona Renaissance Festival, so we watched that afterward, and even though we saw it live on Sunday we howled through the whole thing. ("You and your Taco Bell Spanish!")


Miguel demonstrates how to blow, err, eat a pickle at the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire.


Don Juan sends Miguel into the audience to pick out a beautiful lady to light his fire. That is, his flaming sword.


Revelers resting in the shade.


The Boar's Head Inn is the venue for jugglers, acrobats, stupid pet tricks and people who want to get knocked into a pool of water.


Also for men who like to climb each other. (They assured us that this was legal in Pennsylvania.)


A young Jack Sparrow takes on a serpent!


The Queen objects to naughty behavior at her court.