Poem for Tuesday

The One Secret That Has Carried
By Jason Shinder

Irene loves a man
      who is afraid of sex--
            she's attended

to everything,
      said it was okay,
            held me until I slept.

She says, Why don't you just
      not think about it?
            But I want to know

every sensation,
      nothing untouched,
            though I pull my hand away

once she's found it
      I can't be around a woman
            too long,

too much.
      I say, I was mistreated.
            She says, A cup of tea?

I say, I can't start a thing
      and then
            describe the kind

of thing I'd start.
      We talk about ballrooms,
            long sleeves and sashes,

say someday
      we should go somewhere
            though we can't think

of anywhere
      and then I say abruptly,
            I've never loved

hard enough
      to be loved back.
            I say it as if I've had enough

of the whole goddamn
      world and will never
            be satisfied.

I'm looking
      at the wall.
            She's looking out

the window because
      she needs
            to be somewhere.

Later, I leave a note:
      Sorry for the difficulties.
            Meaning: how come

you don't leave?
      I've never told this story.
            Even at the moment

of dying,
      I would say
            it was someone else's.

--------

My Monday was not as exciting as my weekend. I did laundry, went to Bath & Body Works' semiannual sale ($3 creamy body wash in all current scents, plus $5 Wallflowers refills), did some book rearranging, chatted with the new neighbors moving in one house away (they have a baby boy and sound like they're Russian, though they moved here from New York), and tried to take the kids shopping for new shoes after school, but the wait at the good kids' shoe store was so insane that we ended up leaving. The same mall has a Blockbuster but when the kids found out Meet the Spartans comes out on Tuesday, they convinced me to wait to rent anything till later in the week so they can get that -- we have a coupon -- and then persuaded me to take them to the card store for new Magic card packets. So the score ended up Cards 2, Shoes 0. Sigh.


The craft display at the Washington Folk Festival, housed in the Bumper Car Pavilion.


I bought tie-dye scarves from the vendor in the front right. There were lots of beautiful homemade clothes and jewelry.


In addition to handmade instruments, House of Musical Traditions sells plastic skull maracas, ankle bells and just about anything that kids can use to make noise, even train whistles.


Here's some more Ocean Orchestra. Jennifer Cutting Griffith are singing the loud calls at the end of "Woman of the House."


The full Ocean Orchestra performing Shocking Blue's "Venus."


Here is an older photo of Glen Echo's carousel...


...and one of the yurts under the trees. This group was practicing in the picnic area.

Adam wanted to watch Mr. Bean (we have the complete series on DVD) so after the hilarious adult school episode, I got him to put on "Torvill and Bean," in which Mr. Bean accidentally knocks out Christopher Dean and takes his place on the ice, hee. Then we all watched Titanic: The Final Secret on National Geographic, which was fascinating -- Robert Ballard's story about how the Navy wouldn't help his search for the Titanic unless he helped them with secret surveillance missions to examine the submarines Thresher and Scorpion, both of which went down under unexplained circumstances (with suspicion of Soviet involvement in the latter). He had only two weeks to look for the Titanic after the Scorpion assignment and couldn't tell his French partners what he was actually up to because it was classified. We also watched The Pirate Code, the story of the Whydah; the part that really gets me is the story of John King, the little boy who insisted on becoming a pirate -- he was younger than Adam is now -- and died on the ship when it sank.