Poem for Tuesday

Cana
By Louise Gluck

What can I tell you that you don't know
that will make you tremble again?

Forsythia
by the roadside, by
wet rocks, on the embankments
underplanted with hyacinth --

For ten years I was happy.
You were there; in a sense,
you were always with me, the house, the garden
constantly lit,
not with lights as we have in the sky
but with those emblems of light
which are more powerful, being
implicitly some earthly
thing transformed --

And all of it vanished,
reabsorbed into impassive process. Then
what will we see by,
now that the yellow torches have become
green branches?

--------

Mary Karr wrote of Louise Gluck in Sunday's Poet's Choice in The Washington Post Book World, "In Proofs and Theories, her book of essays on poetry, she explains, 'I do not think that more information always makes a richer poem. I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion...' The way mere ruins of the Coliseum evoke lost grandeur more than a newly articulated structure, or the way a few strokes from Picasso conjure a whole guitar, so Gluck's plain speech makes maximum impact in smallest space."

On Monday I discovered that I had a coupon for a free photo book on Shutterfly that had to be used by the start of April, so in addition to doing laundries, I spent most of the day making a photo book from our 2003 trip driving from Maryland to Los Angeles to Seattle and home again -- a trip we are repeating in part, though we're skipping most of the Southwest in favor of places we didn't get to in the middle of the country last time, and coming home through different national parks in Montana and Utah, though we're also visiting Yellowstone and Devil's Tower in addition to Paul's cousins in Boise. So that's where I'll be while people are at Shore Leave and Portus and Terminus and Toronto Trek. Now I just have to make photo books from our trips to L.A. for various relatives' weddings...next time I have a Shutterfly coupon!


At the University of Pennsylvania's Museum, a statue of a cat from ancient Egypt, its hollow interior suggesting that it was designed to contain a cat mummy.


Cats were elaborately mummified like this one in honor of Bastet, whose cult led to two seemingly contradictory trends: reverence for living household cats so great that a cat murderer could be lynched, and slaughter of kittens as sacrifices to be dedicated to the goddess at her shrines.


This small cat statue was found among other household items.


This stylized limestone lion, however, represented a royal pet with a ruler's name on the cartouche on its chest.


A head of the more warlike protector Sekhmet, a goddess believed to send plagues to the enemies of Egypt while helping ward off disease among her followers. This statue is from the reign of Amenhotep III.


A solid gold and chalcedony amulet of Sekhmet from Memphis, whose patron god, Ptah, was believed to be her consort.


And a Sekhmet from Thebes, probably created around 1400 BCE, believed to have been set up in the Mut Temple at Karnak by Amenhotep III, then moved to the West Bank of the Nile by Rameses II.

Paul got a $50 Red Lobster gift card as a gift along with his bonus at work, so we went out to dinner to celebrate, meaning that I have now eaten way too much for three days in a row, but it was worth it -- we ended up sharing our coconut shrimp, crab linguini, salmon, stuffed flounder, scampi, etc. Then we came home and watched New Amsterdam, which continues not to be as good as I wish it was but is still entertaining enough to watch, though tomorrow night I'm catching up on The Tudors now that the second season has started. (The Armory Show, with that schmaltzy stuff? Oh please.) Then we watched the Lady Terrapins (a top seed) lose to Stanford (a number two seed) in a very good game in which it looked briefly like Stanford was going to blow Maryland out, then it looked briefly like Maryland was going to come roaring back, but in the end, it was Stanford. Oh well! Happy April Fool's Day!