Poem for Friday

Honey at the Table
By Mary Oliver

It fills you with the soft
essence of vanished flowers, it becomes
a trickle sharp as a hair that you follow
from the honey pot over the table

and out the door and over the ground,
and all the while it thickens,

grows deeper and wilder, edged
with pine boughs and wet boulders,
pawprints of bobcat and bear, until

deep in the forest you
shuffle up some tree, you rip the bark,

you float into and swallow the dripping combs,
bits of the tree, crushed bees -- a taste
composed of everything lost, in which everything lost is found.

--------

In honor of the last day of school -- Daniel had English and history exams postponed because of the power outages last week, Adam had a music test identical to the diagnostic at the start of the year to see how much they had learned -- I took my kids, who got out at lunchtime, to Bagel City and then the pool. Daniel isn't feeling terrific (he has a cold again) so he was here most of the afternoon and watched Star Trek: The Next Generation with me while Adam was swimming and eating ice cream with his friends -- it seems like half the seventh grade belongs to our pool. It's not as hot as it was at the beginning of the week but it's still plenty hot after spending any time out in the sun.


A replica of the remains of the USS Monitor at the National Aquarium in Washington, DC.


The wreck site is a National Marine Sanctuary, and all the aquarium displays are based on US marine sites.


We saw some of the recovered parts of the Monitor at The Mariners' Museum in Newport News. http://cruisedirector.livejournal.com/808989.html
http://littlereview.livejournal.com/433793.html
But we did not see any eel!


Apart from the snakes, 's and my favorite animals at the aquarium were the seahorses.


These live among corals...


...and in some cases grassy fronds, though in all the photos I took of those, the seahorses were hiding.


And, you know, sharks are pretty cool, too.

In the evening after dinner, DementorDelta picked me up and took me with her to registration for con.txt, where I saw lots of people I knew including Gblvr, Neotoma, Rubyrosered, Adbaculum, Barbana, Meri Oddities, Treewishes and several people I am undoubtedly forgetting, plus I finally met who is a good friend of many of my fannish friends. There was much discussion of fannish loves and fic and journals, and there was a getting-to-know-you questionnaire on which one question was Ginger vs. Mary Ann and I said Mrs. Howell, which is probably why I matched up with few fannish soulmates. I really suck at conventions -- the panel aspect feels like work to me, since I've gone to so many where I actually was working for Another Universe or TrekToday, and I'm no good at group schmoozing. I'm so much more comfortable in smaller groups!

Happy Friday the 13th!