Little Reviews: Poem for Friday

How the Dance Came to the City
By Eavan Boland

It came with the osprey, the cormorants, the air
at the edge of the storm, on the same route as
the blight and with the nightly sweats that said fever.

It came with the scarlet tunics and rowel spurs,
with the epaulettes and their poisonous drizzle of gold,
with the boots, the gloves, the whips, the flash of the cuirasses.

It came with a sail riding the empire-blue haze
of the horizon growing closer, gaining and then
it was there: the whole creaking orchestra of salt and canvas.

And here is the cargo, deep in the hold of the ship,
stored with the coiled ropes and crated spice and coal,
the lumber and boredom of arrival, underneath

timbers shifting and clicking from the turnaround
of the tides locked at the mouth of Dublin Bay, is
the two-step, the quick step, the whirl, the slow return.

Tonight in rooms where skirts appear steeped in tea
when they are only deep in shadow and where heat
collects at the waist, the wrist, is wet at the base of the neck,

the secrets of the dark will be the truths of the body
a young girl feels and hides even from herself as she lets fall
satin from her thighs to her ankles, as she lets herself think

how it started, just where: with the minuet, the quadrille,
the chandeliers glinting, the noise wild silk makes and
her face flushed and wide-eyed in the mirror of his sword.

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Have spent nearly the entire day working on photo projects -- cards, posters, books, gifts -- because I had coupons that expired at midnight. Finished everything, had a fantastic time doing it, wish I could do it for a living. When I was in college, in the dark ages before layout programs were ubiquitous in college newsrooms, we still pasted up the newspaper by hand and the campus news, features and city editors were responsible for layout on their own pages; I was the features editor and did nearly everything for two pages a week, campus life and campus arts, from assigning the stories and art to overseeing the pasting up of waxed type on a light board -- sometimes I did that myself, but The Daily Pennsylvanian actually employed two professionals to print and align the news and ad copy. Real world newspapers did not work like that even when I graduated, and now roles are even more specialized in both journalism and publishing -- I have nowhere near the training to do professional graphic design, particularly given my lack of experience with Pagemaker since version 2.0 and my dilettante's knowledge of Photoshop, but sometimes I really wish I could get a job doing something like that.

Trek news, done in a hurry so I could meet my own personal midnight deadline, was more Patrick Stewart preening about having brought the Bard to ignorant Trekkies (because there were no references at all to Shakespeare in the original series, certainly not in episode titles and I must have hallucinated that entire episode about the company of players) and Kurtzman, Orci and Abrams being The Most Important Men In Hollywood Who Aren't Scientologists. (Or maybe they are Scientologists, they certainly seem cozy enough with Tom Cruise.) Watched Smallville, enjoyed it, don't really have a lot to say about it except ugh, Lex, you really better have been deliberately manipulating Lana because if you meant a word of that "shoot me now" crap I will have to throw up, and I want Lionel and I'm kind of confused how Lex found Lana anyway -- can't she even hide right? And why couldn't we have a Kara who's more like Kara aka Starbuck? I'm underwhelmed by Supergirl; I wish they were giving Chloe and Lois better material instead of bringing on a new blonde. Ah well, at least Lois has a Daily Planet job.