Friday, October 17, 2008

Poem for Friday

Low
By Arda Collins


It's not happiness, but something else; waiting
for the light to change; a bakery.

It's a lake. It emerges from darkness into the next day surrounded by
     pines.
There's a couple.

It's a living room. The upholstery is yellow and the furniture is
     walnut.
They used to lie down on the carpet

between the sofa and the coffee table, after the guests had left.

The cups and saucers were still.

Their memories of everything that occurred took place
with the other's face as a backdrop and sometimes

the air was grainy like a movie about evening, and sometimes there
     was an ending
in the air that looked like a scene from a different beginning,

in which they are walking.

It took place alongside a scene in which one of them looks up at a
     brown rooftop
early in March. The ground hadn't softened.

One walked in front of the other breathing.
The other saw a small house as they passed and breathed. The
     reflections in the windows

made them hear the sounds on the hill: a crow, a dog, and
     branches—
and they bent into the hour that started just then, like bending to
     walk under branches.

--------

I spent a lot of the morning reading, catching up on phone calls and e-mail, and fighting with a Sudoku that I had to start over because I wrote a 6 where I meant a 9 and screwed up the whole thing. Then I met at the wonderful Indian restaurant Minerva in Rockville, after which I intended to make a couple of stops on Rockville Pike, but there was a lot of traffic coming down from Shady Grove so I ended up coming home to get the kids -- good thing too, I'd been thinking that older son was staying late for robotics and forgot that because there was no school on Friday, there was no late activity bus on Thursday.

Spent the late afternoon folding laundry and watching August Rush, which was extremely corny to the point of being annoying -- an adoption fable in which Everyone Is Mystically Connected Via Music and the ending is even more contrived than Annie -- but it had some interesting performances, particularly Freddy Highmore as the title character and Robin Williams as a creepy promoter of young buskers, though even the creepy people in this film aren't very -- no one would ever take advantage of a dreamy little boy alone. (Keri Russell and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers don't have nearly enough to do except look incandescent in her case and look bitter in his case.) There are some nice Love Letter to New York sequences and some beautiful scenes in churches and parks, but I wouldn't recommend it unless you're so much in the mood for a feel-good movie that you don't care if it's one cliche after another.


Last weekend when we went downtown, a turtle was sitting happily on a covered filter while ducks went swimming by.


Some ducks, though, were a bit envious of the turtle's location.


This one circled the spot...


...and went to recruit a friend...


...and finally climbed up on the filter, causing the turtle to retreat into its shell.


The duck preened its feathers...


...and tried to impress its friend...


...and eventually the turtle peered out again, ignoring them.


Watched the Love Test episode of Smallville -- I liked the concept lots better on Space: 1999 when the evil alien was testing Koenig and Russell to see if they really, really loved each other, because the Smallville version had too much in common with The Moment of Truth (which I only ever saw commercials for, not the actual show, so maybe the show was really tasteful in its questions, but I somehow doubt it). Spoilers: I forgive the episode because both couples ended up where I wanted them too -- Jimmy and Chloe happy together and what I always thought was Jimmy's canonical backstory restored, Lois realizing she has feelings for Clark that she doesn't want to talk about partly because she doesn't trust them and partly because she's not sure he returns them, but a definite hopeful trend and not a single word from Clark about Lana being his true love.

And I just had to save these links to the lawsuit against God and the Bee Gees CPR.

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