Poem for Friday

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By Bruce Weigl

I didn't know I was grateful
            for such late-autumn
                        bent-up cornfields

yellow in the after-harvest
             sun before the
                        cold plow turns it all over

into never.
            I didn't know
                        I would enter this music

that translates the world
             back into dirt fields
                         that have always called to me

as if I were a thing
             come from the dirt,
                         like a tuber,

or like a needful boy. End
             Lonely days, I believe. End the exiled
                         and unraveling strangeness.

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I had a pretty quiet catch-up Thursday. and I were supposed to have lunch, but due to complications in both our weeks, I begged to postpone till next week. Caught up on a bunch of phone calls and article writing, visited with my mother for awhile, had two of Adam's friends over after school while Daniel went home with Omar. The kids have no school Friday due to some teacher's conference, so I had to get various chores done so we can go to the Countryside Artisans open house tomorrow...Daniel is pleased because there will be glassblowing, Adam is pleased because there will be sheep.















Watched Smallville with Dean Cain, really did not like the episode though I enjoyed seeing him there. In fact, my favorite part was the public service announcement at the end, where Cain stepped into Christopher Reeve's shoes and made a plea for involvement and donations to aid paralyzed people. It makes me very happy that the later Supermans have remained involved in this issue. Otherwise, the only thing I really liked about the episode was the fact that Cain obviously can come back when there's a better script. This episode wanted to be Requiem for Methuselah but it had already made Curtis Knox unforgivably unsympathetic, and in doing so made Chloe quite pathetic.

So the girl who has always been fascinated by meteor freaks is so terrified of being one that she'll submit to a dangerous untested procedure that's as likely to get her killed as her particular gift, and moreover is so afraid that she'll lose the boy she can have that she says idiotic things to the boy she's always wanted about wanting to be normal and blah blah blah. I like Chloe whether she's a meteor freak or a Muggle, but not when she's trying to remake herself for a man, no matter which man it is. (Clark gets no bonus points either for stealing maple syrup for Lana. Please!)

I never followed the comics, but whether or not it's canon that there was bad blood between Jor-El and his brother, none of the Supergirl backstory was at all a surprise and it was all pretty badly written. Laura Vandervoort is not nearly a good enough actress to make this stuff work. All the good scenes in the episode involved Michael Rosenbaum, Tom Welling and Dean Cain in various combinations and then it's just residual hotness. Lex and Clark snarking at each other while Lex is telling Clark that Knox is apparently immortal is charming. Clark saying "You and I are more alike than you think" to Knox (on the pain of watching people they love die) makes me think what a perfect boyfriend Clark would have made for the immortal Knox if only the immortal Knox were not a murderous asshole. (They should have written him more like Hugh Jackman's character in The Fountain and convinced Teri Hatcher to play his lover.)

And then there's the Martian Manhunter. Kara asks Clark whom he's going to trust, family or some guy from Mars, and my family are all yelling, "Trust her, because there's no such thing as people from Mars!" Then the MM says, "Your father and I had a 'don't ask, don't tell' policy when it came to crime and punishment," and Adam says, "So he and Jor-El were gay?" This was definitely the high point of the storyline for me!

Am not in the mood for thinking any more about sellout Senators or racist Nobel Prize-winning scientists, but I am curious what the cops were looking for in David Copperfield's warehouse -- lots of duplicates of the magician in tanks? -- and I must ask whether The Washington Post staff is on crack, reporting Congressional votes by astrological sign?