Poem for Thursday

Psalm
By Alicia Suskin Ostriker

I am not lyric any more
I will not play the harp
for your pleasure

I will not make a joyful
noise to you, neither
will I lament

for I know you drink
lamentation, too,
like wine

so I dully repeat
you hurt me
I hate you

I pull my eyes away from the hills
I will not kill for you
I will never love you again

unless you ask me

--------

I wish I had something exciting to report but I feel like this is a very boring time of year. Don't get me wrong, a fun time of year anticipating stuff, though for me it's a bit melancholy since I keep getting reminders that I am getting old and I don't just mean because my children tell me so regularly. *g* Daniel decided I could have the really soft warm microfiber animal print throw my mother got him months ago that he had never even taken out of the package, so I am sitting very comfortably under it in my new chenille sweater on sale at Sears for under $20 -- I love chenille and microfiber, and velvet and velour and all the soft snuggly things this time of year. And I love the bourbon chicken in the mall food court, and I had that for lunch since I was out shopping for presents and returning stuff. Am working on framesets for littlereview.com's photo pages...right now they're in html, next up is learning css for that!

The rest of my squee for the day is stuff like the baby bottlenose dolphin at the National Aquarium and the fact that I can keep watching the Alan Rickman clip from Sweeney Todd over and over, even though I am wildly ambivalent about that movie...absolutely adore the casting but then I am terrified about the music, having grown up with the Lansbury-Cariou Broadway album in the days when albums were vinyl, and does Alan remind me a bit too much of Snape swooping around and will that affect Snape for me in the movies and I am overthinking this! Evening television was the Shrek Christmas special, which was cute enough but why must ogres celebrate Christmas as opposed to some ogre-specific solstice holiday that would have made me much happier while conveying the same message about togetherness and blah blah blah? Anyway, in Donkey's honor:


Little donkeys in the kids' farm area of the National Zoo. Shrek made me think of this...the donkey rolling around in the dirt!


Here are the four donkeys, George, Pat, Giuseppe and Flash. They are gelded male miniature Mediterranean donkeys.


The cows, a Holstein and a Hereford.


And goats Ethel and Lucy.

After Shrek we watched the Grinch because it was on, and then Pushing Daisies. I'm sure it was the fault of the Christmas specials, but I was thinking about the dead fruit and the pies and the loaves and the fishes, and "Morning Has Broken" and "Birdhouse in Your Soul" and Ned's pacifism and Chuck as Christ figure, and lots of other potentially cracked theological analysis which I threw aside when I couldn't fit the sex doll into the equation. When did sex dolls become so mainstream? Between Boston Legal and Lars and the Real Girl and this, I'm starting to feel uncool because I've actually never seen a sex doll live.

Spoilers: As usual I can't pick a single favorite moment visually -- Olive spinning her sadness into anger as the room spins around, and then the dream sequence of being spun around by the man she dismissed? The interior of the Willy Wonka On Acid candy store? I loved the development of the theme of relative truth, which starts out nutty -- Charlotte insisting that if the sex doll is alive for Burly Bruce, that's his truth, even though he's a psychopathic murderer ("The truth could knock all it wanted, but Burly Bruce would not open the door, and maybe that was for the best") -- and ends up really sad, with Ned unable to keep from telling Charlotte that he killed her father because it's something he can give her, since he can't touch her, even though he's already rationalized the lie of omission ("Being locked in prison was worse than a metaphor about truth.") Confession as crime of passion, according to the narrator...when we're all expecting "I love you"!

And they completely had me going with Molly Shannon's mittens -- I was so sure she killed her brother for some reason we would find out later, like not being competitive enough. The ending was a bit silly with such an outsider be responsible, and not really in keeping with the bitterness theme since everything else was so personal ("Bitter much?") but who cares when it's so witty and stylish, "A girl could get a cavity standing next to you," "It's the Lord of the Pies," "Don't go over to the dark side," and the fake Fish Called Wanda stutter and The Birds and The Pie Ho and Olive's analysis that if people you liked had to like you back, we'd be living in a different universe "and then something else would probably suck." I am going to be so sad when the long hiatus starts and this show had better come back!