Poem for Friday

Light Bulb
By David Shapiro

1960

Our father
restless afraid of death
would say You will rest
when you’re dead

Perhaps not!
And: Practice or you’ll eat
in the garage
with the dog

Dead as the light
bulb is living still
A secret for the light bulb
is the nap

of broken music
There are some veins
in brown plaster
But the world emits

a little light
You wore cereal boxes
as a belt
I wore electric light

as another mistake
The search continued
for more veins and
a dented skull

This too had a pedestal
or place
or base or double
door or triple tomb.

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We had chilly rain all day, including sleet. Had a hectic day getting Daniel ready to go on a three-day field trip to Georgia with his school's chorus, getting Adam to catch up on the homework he hasn't had to do for three days due to Maryland state assessments, getting Star Trek: The Next Generation watched to review on Friday (the terrific "Who Watches the Watchers"), getting Daniel picked up from his robotics party and driven back to school in the evening to get on the overnight bus for Atlanta, plus getting caught up on various chores, so instead of listening to me blather about the boring domestic stuff, have some more adorable lambs from Mount Vernon a couple of weekends ago:















Speaking of Daniel, his school's marching band plays in a scene in State of Play, the political thriller filming in DC with Russell Crowe and Ben Affleck. And the school newspaper got an exclusive interview with Russell! The movie is about journalists, and Russell told the high school journalists, "I wanted to explore the ambiguity of journalism...in my life it has great effect. It's a kind of a conceit that journalists live under, that they remain objective. That's never been my experience. They're all too human, all too emotionally affected...so I think examining that conceit and examining the true input of human experience in the journalism that we read, it was very interesting for me." Heh.