Poem for Friday

Moon
By Mark Strand

Open the book of evening to the page
where the moon, always the moon, appears

between two clouds, moving so slowly that hours
will seem to have passed before you reach the next page

where the moon, now brighter, lowers a path
to lead you away from what you have known

into those places where what you had wished for happens,
its lone syllable like a sentence poised

at the edge of sense, waiting for you to say its name
once more as you lift your eyes from the page

and close the book, still feeling what it was like
to dwell in that light, that sudden paradise of sound.

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I had an uneventful day compared to Wednesday. The weather was cooler and rainy, so I had to keep throwing the kids out of the house whenever it was clear enough; they spent lots of time playing Wii, reading, building with Legos and talking in both my ears at once. *g* PerkyPaduan came over around lunchtime and we ate the leftover pizza from yesterday, along with the kids and younger son's best friend, whose parents have gone off to San Francisco over his spring break and left him with a babysitter; I feel very badly for him but it is both loud and exhausting having an extra child in the house all day. She is a few weeks behind me watching Torchwood, so we watched "Meat" and "Adam," neither of which is my favorite where Gwen and Tosh are concerned but they both remind me of things I loved about X-Files and have lovely moments with Jack and Ianto.

Flying Creatures from the Australia Exhibit at the National Aquarium:















Since we were on a roll with Torchwood, we watched "Adrift" and "Fragments" after dinner...the former made me bawl, and the latter I just loved -- finally a really rocking Toshiko storyline! Spoilers: "Adrift" goes beyond every parent's nightmare...I was so pissed off at Jack, though, lying to Gwen instead of telling her the truth (how much does Ianto know exactly?) and then being put in a position where he has to let her find out for herself how much better it is for the loved ones of those who return not to know what really happened to them (can't Torchwood fake papers on that, anyway, pretend it was a quick death during an amusement park ride or something?). The "missing" posters reminded me so much of the 9/11 walls as well as the milk carton photos that I'm sure they were supposed to echo. Because they did it the way they did, it had huge emotional impact but I thought it made Jack look pretty dreadful -- not that a flawed Jack is in any way a bad thing, but he still has the Doctor's "I know better than you" attitude towards pretty much everyone he works with.

"Fragments" made so much more sense of Ianto, his relationship with Jack, how he got away with hiding Lisa and why he's sometimes the coffee boy but sometimes smarter than Tosh. And Tosh's backstory is awesome! I was so glad it was family devotion and not a guy who lured her into crime, because given what we've seen of her so far this season, desperate to find luuurve like Gwen has, I did worry. Instead it's Owen who's damaged by failed love, and how much sense did that make and how wonderfully did Burn Gorman play it! (The idea that he walked away without a scratch even though his body can't repair itself, or for that matter that his lungs that can't cough were able to clear out the dust from the explosion, is ridiculous but I am just trying not to think about how his undeadness works.) I was a bit sorry they played Jack's introduction to Torchwood for laughs, though they certainly had enough horror in the episode...I really liked the evil recruiter women and was sorry they were gone so quickly.

And since it's Thursday, we all watched Smallville together in the midst of this. I must admit that all the new mythology feels completely tacked on to me but at the same time, I like it and wish they'd started it much sooner, so I am ambivalent! Spoilers: I hear that the "someone's going to die" rumors are back and this time I'm pretty sure it will be Lionel, because Dad has to get out of the way for Lex to rise to the status of lone supervillain, and I am so, so sorry about this because Lionel is a major reason I watch the show. (Though I did snort when Lionel said he was chosen by Jor-El to be his emissary, because John Glover wanted to be an emissary on Deep Space Nine so badly that he stole the Dax symbiont from Jadzia.) I cannot feel anything at all about Brainiac sucking out Lana's brain -- I cannot feel anything at all about Lana except hope that she will have as few scenes as possible -- so my favorite moments were Lois and Jimmy working together and the flashbacks suggesting that Christopher Reeve was in Swann's wheelchair.