Poem for Wednesday

Meditations on a Moth
By Meghan O'Rourke

"How splendid yellow is."--Vincent Van Gogh

My poor eye. It has done
so much looking--at the sky, at the dark-fretted
trumpets in the frescoes of the Chrysler Building,
at the opium dens of High and Low,
where bodies sway like white flowers--
amount due, amount due.
Is the blue the blue you think of when I tell you?
Do ghosts have neuroses?
What is the point of the haunting they do?
Here--look. No, look.
I am trying to rid myself of myself;
to see past the tumbling clouds.
All evening drums rumble in the corner park.
The mobsters convene when the cops leave.
What goes down stays down,
the street at three A.M. a fantastic absence of color.
Outside the studio window
a river slides along its dulcimer bed,
aquifers and accordions and Alcatraz.
But you have to get up in the morning.
The brute blind glare of snow in sun.
Look again, and up you may rise
to something quite surprising in the distance.

--------

Tuesday. Laundry. Dishwasher. Donation to the Vietnam Veterans Association. I'm a bit freaked out -- I found out that a distant cousin-by-marriage died of a heart attack on Monday, not someone I knew well at all, but he was younger than my parents. And I've been following the Natasha Richardson news, hoping the worst stories are exaggerations but thinking that it's very unlikely they'd put someone with cerebral swelling on a plane unless the situation was dire, and the fact that no one has refuted the headlines can't be a good thing. I don't know why this upsets me so much, it's not like she's one of my favorite celebrities -- maybe because she's only a bit older than me and her sons are a bit younger than mine.


Inside the Maryland Science Center, models of dinosaurs found not far from where the museum now stands overlook the harbor. I bet they'd like to eat what's in the aquarium across the water.


A model of a dinosaur in an egg beside an actual dinosaur egg, with a magnifying glass so people can see the tiny bones.


This late carnivore reminds me unnervingly of a big sleepy cat sprawled over the back of a couch.


Petrified wood, below, and a triceratops horn, above.


In the SpaceLink area upstairs, kids can drive a miniature Mars rover via remote control...


...and study the moon, the earth, and other celestial bodies on this projection sphere.


The science center also has a ferret, a rabbit, and various other resident animals that come out to meet groups of kids. I'm not sure whether this puppy is a permanent resident or a visitor, but he was out greeting people too.


Here's one more shot of a blue crab in the Chesapeake Bay exhibit. I doubt any other state science center has so many.

We discovered that March of the Penguins was on public television, so even though we own it on DVD, we had to put it on. Turned out that it was a pledge drive airing, meaning that they interrupted every twenty minutes for ten minutes of asking for money, so after the first break so Adam could see what sort of stuffed penguins they were giving out for a $150 donation, we put on our DVD and watched the rest, plus the National Geographic special on the penguin critter-cam. I haven't seen the movie in a couple of years, and I really enjoyed it.