Poem for Monday

Dinky
By Theodore Roethke

O what's the weather in a Beard?
It's windy there, and rather weird,
And when you think the sky has cleared
          -- Why, there is Dirty Dinky.

Suppose you walk out in a Storm,
With nothing on to keep you warm,
And then step barefoot on a Worm
          -- Of course, it's Dirty Dinky.

As I was crossing a hot hot Plain,
I saw a sight that caused me pain,
You asked me before, I'll tell you again:
          -- It looked like Dirty Dinky.

Last night you lay a-sleeping?
No! The room was thirty-five below;
The sheets and blankets turned to snow.
          -- He'd got in: Dirty Dinky.

You'd better watch the things you do,
You'd better watch the things you do.
You're part of him; he's part of you
          -- You may be Dirty Dinky.

--------

Another from Poet's Choice in The Washington Post Book World. "As shown by anonymous childhood chants about greasy grimy gopher guts, we can take pleasure in the messy or messed up," writes Robert Pinsky. "Roethke succeeds at that...orderly rhyme and messed-up experiences here -- as in much poetry of all kinds -- lead to a final, powerful, psychological insight."

After Adam got home from Hebrew school, we went downtown to the Smithsonian -- first the National Portrait Gallery and American Art Museum, then the National Gallery of Art because I wanted to see the Turner exhibit again before it left for Dallas. American Art has Kindred Spirits, much of which I believe is the same Asher B. Durand exhibit that we saw in Philadelphia a couple of years ago, which was the major reason I wanted to go there and it has lots of information and a wonderful collection of his portraits as well as the gorgeous forests he painted (unlike, say, Bierstadt, there's more shadow than layers of light in Durand). It also has a terrific exhibit of World War I posters and the amazing For SAAM, a massive column of messages in light.

The Portrait Gallery has a small but wonderful exhibit of photos and posters of Katharine Hepburn, complete with screen showing clips from her movies and -- this should not have thrilled me so much -- a case with all four of her Academy Awards. (We also peeked a bit at the presidents.) Then we walked to the National Mall and went to see the Turners, which required a detour through the Dutch galleries because a symphony orchestra was rehearsing in one of the interior courtyards for an evening concert. It was so lovely to walk through listening to Grieg! All the museums were fairly empty but the Turner exhibit was crowded; the kids, at least, were reasonably attentive and not too loud.


The new courtyard between the American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery.


Although it's under cover, there are places where it's always "raining" on the floor of the courtyard...


...with rain that drains away beneath the tiles.


I don't know exactly how this works, but it somehow keeps the floor wet without any appearance of mist.


Here's the stained glass window from the inside.


And the space inside the space...


...with this stunning glass ceiling.

I'm almost too embarrassed to admit what I watched on cable on Sunday night...oh fine, it was The Devil Wears Prada, which is the opposite of my kind of movie in so many ways, but I like Anne Hathaway and Stanley Tucci and I was curious to see Meryl Streep, who seems determined to reinvent herself onscreen as the Bitch of Life now that Glenn Close no longer wants the mantle (or maybe those are the only interesting roles offered to women of a certain age). I should probably confess at this juncture that at a very low time in my life, Sex and the City helped me stay sane, and this film kind of presses those nostalgic buttons for me.

Half my flist is linking right now to gloom-and-doom articles about LiveJournal's new owners that I can't read because both IJ and GJ are down, and the other half my flist is bitching about how both IJ and GJ are down. At the risk of contributing to all the negativity everywhere...doesn't anyone have a positive suggestion? Like, let's pool our money and buy a bunch of servers and make our own site, or something? I'd do it if I knew how, because god knows that if I was interested in corporate wealth, I'd have found a way to sell out by now. ("Let's give all our money to InsaneJournal" sounds so much like "let's give all our money to JournalFen" did a couple of years ago, and we can all see how that turned out.) Of course I want the freedom to post what I want, but I feel so drained by all the unhappiness that I don't much feel like posting squee, which the world needs more of at the moment.