Poem for Sunday

That Music
By Robert Hass

The creek's silver in the sun of almost August,
And bright dry air, and last runnels of snowmelt,
Percolating through the roots of mountain grasses
Vinegar weed, golden smoke, or meadow rust,

Do they confer, do the lovers' bodies
In the summer dusk, his breath, her sleeping face,
Confer -- , does the slow breeze in the pines?
If you were the interpreter. if that were your task.

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From Poet's Choice in The Washington Post Book World, a tribute by Robert Pinsky to former poet laureate Robert Hass, who wrote the weekly column several years earlier. Time and Materials: Poems, 1997-2005 is the first book from Hass in ten years and "contains a number of brooding, inventive poems that unfold over several pages. Deft variations of approach and imagination keep these poems moving...here from the middle of the volume is a poem of summer. Hass uses the name of plants expressively, the way a casting director might use faces. Nature here is attractive, significant, severe and distinctly not human."

Had a very busy but nice Saturday, and actually got a lot done around the house in between bouts of not being home. Daniel had a Bar Mitzvah service to attend in the morning, so Adam was my mother's aide at Hebrew school. She talked my sister's two older daughters into attending as well, and apparently they all worked in the computer lab together. We had lunch at my parents' with my sister's family -- the kids all very pleasant until late afternoon while the adults talked Jon Stewart, politics, movies, books, etc.

Then we came home so Daniel could get ready for the Bar Mitzvah reception and I could go out to dinner with , , , , , and several other people including the lovely who picked me up en route, and brought me a treasure trove: a collection of Barbie clothes and accessories that she accumulated in fandoms past and was going to donate to charity but let me pick over first. There's scuba gear, skis, rollerblades, fancy panties, bridal gowns, microphones and boom boxes, tea sets, a faux leather jacket that's half Union Jack and half Stars & Stripes...far too many goodies to recount here. Hey, I have no daughters so I am allowed to collect my own Barbie stuff. *g*

Anyway, dinner at Addis Ababa was fantastic -- I'm not sure exactly what I ate, because we shared platters, but there were lentils and chicken and potatoes and everything was delicious. Afterward some of us went to Cold Stone for ice cream, which I couldn't even finish. Came home, looked through the Barbie goodies, eventually retrieved Daniel from the Bar Mitzvah reception...while he was out I finally (only a year later) hung up the sign-in board from his Bar Mitzvah as well as Bar Mitzvah photos we finally received from the photographer courtesy my mother, a penguin print my in-laws had bought for Adam, plus the painting made by the penguin at the Maryland Zoo that we won in an auction near Adam's birthday. And the living room got cleaned up because the kitten kept batting people's stuff around, so we told them to put it away!


Photos of the Free Lancers at the Maryland Renaissance Festival, promised to .


Sir Henry Clifford, before the Hat Incident...


...and after. *g*


Not a great photo but you can see broken pieces of one of the lances in the dirt.


And here, the charge!