Poem for Wednesday

An Improvisation For Angular Momentum
By A.R. Ammons

Walking is like
imagination, a
single step
dissolves the circle
into motion; the eye here
and there rests
on a leaf,
gap, or ledge,
everything flowing
except where
sight touches seen:
stop, though, and
reality snaps back
in, locked hard,
forms sharply
themselves, bushbank,
dentree, phoneline,
definite, fixed,
the self, too, then
caught real, clouds
and wind melting
into their directions,
breaking around and
over, down and out,
motions profound,
alive, musical!

Perhaps the death mother like the birth mother
does not desert us but comes to tend
and produce us, to make room for us
and bear us tenderly, considerately,
through the gates, to see us through,
to ease our pains, quell our cries,
to hover over and nestle us, to deliver
us into the greatest, most enduring
peace, all the way past the bother of
recollection,
beyond the finework of frailty,
the mishmash house of the coming & going,
creation's fringes,
the eddies and curlicues

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Most of the excitement in my life Tuesday was taking place on the other side of the country. My uncle and his family, with whom my parents were staying in their home above Santa Clarita, were evacuated the night before last. My parents stayed with friends on the other side of LA, then drove to San Diego yesterday for my father's law conference, only to learn that the conference had been canceled and the airport temporarily closed. My father managed to swap his weekend plane tickets so they are flying home Wednesday morning if the flights are on, getting home tomorrow night.

My uncle's neighborhood in Castaic is listed as threatened from the Ranch and Buckweed fires, though it sounds like he still might be luckier than his former neighborhood in Stevenson Ranch. He and his family are in a hotel. There was fire at the cul de sac at the bottom of his street. It sounds terrifying. I'm a bit bummed that Boston Legal was pre-empted for 20/20 but we watched the special on the fires, which was interesting and very sad -- lots of people without homes. At least Qualcomm Stadium appears to be far better prepared and equipped for the crowds coming in than the Superdome was after Katrina.


Sugarloaf Studio has a labyrinth cut into the grass in front of their workspace.


Next door, Dancing Leaf Farm has a Celtic cross in the front yard.


And just around the side, Dancing Leaf has sheep to produce wool.


I love the Jacob sheep with the double sets of horns.


During the fall Countryside Artisans tour, the leaves were beginning to change at the edge of the property.


In front of Dancing Leaf's crafts shop, more sculpture.


And an old shed and pump at Sugarloaf Studio.



My big afternoon project was putting the books back on the bookcases where they had to be moved during the flood, though the bookcase at the top of the stairs will have to be moved again when that wall is painted...at least the books have been sorted and organized and the books for young children can be given away (will see if I can send them to California). I see that Patrick Stewart is confirmed to do Macbeth in New York next February...I want to go! Folded laundry while watching Philadelphia, which I haven't seen since it was new...it feels rather dated, which makes me pretty happy. Some things, at least, have changed for the better for gay people, though I also get so angry when I think about all the progress not made on AIDS prevention and treatment due to stupid policies in health care and education. But yay, the space shuttle got off all right!