Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Poem for Tuesday

River Of Souls
By Dan Fogelberg


I take my place along the shore and I wait for the tide.
It seems I've passed this way before in an earlier time.
I hear a voice like mystery blowing warm through the night;
The silent moon embraces me and I'm drawn to her light.

I follow footprints in the sand to a circle of stone,
Find a fire burning bright though I came here alone,
And in the play of shadows cast I can dimly discern
The shapes of all who've gone before calling me to return.

There are no names that fit these faces,
There are no lines that can define these ancient spaces.
The spirits dance across the ages
And melt into a river of souls.

I take my place along the shore and I wait for the tide.
It seems I've passed this way before in an earlier time.
To every man the mystery sings a different song,
He fills his page of history, dreams his dreams and is gone.

Lo que es mio,
Lo que es de Dios,
Lo que es del rio,
Melt into a river of souls.

--------

It wasn't easy to pick one Dan Fogelberg song -- I had trouble deciding which ones not to include, but I figured I should pick one more recent than The Innocent Age which was a big influence on me in high school. RIP.

I had a quiet Monday doing chores around the house and online, plus some post office stuff. When Adam got home from school, he had e-mail for the first time in a long time from his good friend who moved to Venezuela three years ago, convinced the friend to get a Google Talk account and within minutes the two of them were chatting like they'd never stopped. It was really cute (animals and video games being, apparently, a univeral language for boys). Plus I got holiday cards from some overseas friends and fannish friends, and one came with a present!


A model of a penguin wearing the Crittercam at the National Geographic Explorers Hall.


There was a display on how the camera was strapped to the penguin, complete with video.


The Crittercam on the humpback whale was attached to a flipper.


There were more displays on sea turtles, lions, bears, seals, sea lions, pigeons and a DC cat who caught a mouse and ate it on camera.


This is Nigersaurus, 110 million years old, who lived when Africa and South America were still joined together.


And this is an African pterosaur, a fish-eater with a 16-foot wing span also discovered at the Niger site. Son is of the opinion that it needed braces and headgear.


Also at National Geographic, a photo display on the Alaskan wilderness and how global warming is affecting it. Here are images of glaciers receding in three areas.


Journeyman was pretty good tonight, though not so good that I was devastated to learn earlier in the day that NBC chose not to pick up the show beyond its initial 13 episodes...I just hope the last script completed before the strike resolves some of the mysteries that I think should have been explored in more detail earlier in the series. Spoilers: Favorite line in recent memory: "Thanks for...saving our lives and everything." The plot was pretty predictable: kid knew mom was going blind, wanted the camera for money to save her eyesight, didn't realize he'd die and consign her to darkness forever, but he came off as an obnoxious little shit anyway...not a great casting job.

Whereas Dan's daughter-who-isn't has the opposite problem. Real young kids don't smile sweetly and talk about red licorice when their parents are mad and don't even recognize them; they freak out. I don't much like Jack's attitude toward women and fatherhood but at least "I knocked up my girlfriend" sounds very real. (And Katie's sister telling him to make the decision that's best for him becuase that will be best for everyone...and this is the woman pissed at how he treated her sister?) Of course the Evil Female CEO gets killed for her ambition, because the proper place for women on this series is primarily as wives, mothers, hippies and psychics (they can be reporters and doctors and time travelers but they get defined by their men and children anyway).

Read the preview of J.K. Rowling from the upcoming Leaky Cauldron Pottercast and was pleased by this: "In the wizarding world...I think you could be gay, pureblood, and totally without any kind of criticism from the Lucius Malfoys of the world. I don't think that’s something that would interest him at all." That's always how I wrote Lucius. And Dementor Delta linked me to The Courant's Alan Rickman interview in which he talks about fame, Judge Turpin and "Radcliffe" as he refers to his Harry Potter co-star.

My grandfather would be 97 today. He died a couple of weeks before my wedding in 1990.

No comments:

Post a Comment