Poem for Wednesday

Heaven's Eel
By Charles Wright

A slight wrinkle on the pond.
Small wind.
                  A small wind and the rumpled clouds' reflection.
Ho hum . . . What's needed is something under the pond's skin,
Something we can't see that controls all the things that we do see.
Something long and slithery,
                                      something we can't begin to comprehend,
A future we're all engendered for, sharp teeth, Lord, such sharp teeth.
Heaven's eel.
                      Heaven's eel, long and slick,
Full moon gone, with nothing in its place.
A doe is nibbling away at the long stalks of the natural world
Across the creek.
                            It's good to be here.
It's good to be where the world's quiescent, and reminiscent.
No wind blows from the far sky.
Beware of prosperity, friend, and seek affection.
The eel's world is not your world,
                                            but will be soon enough.

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Another from this week's New Yorker.

Tuesday was much better than Monday, in large part because my head had stopped pounding by about 2 p.m. One of the things I really want from health care reform is affordable Imitrex -- thinking, "Shit, if I take another pill, that makes this a $36 migraine instead of an $18 migraine" really does not help my headache at all. I feel accomplished in that I got out of the house long enough to pick up ceramic manatees from a Freecycler -- shut up, you know you wish you had ceramic manatees, I know Adam does -- and stop at CVS for Halloween decorations mouthwash. Plus I got the laundry done. Here is the billy goat trail and canal from Sunday:















In the evening we watched the cheerful shows on the Science Channel -- Parallel Universe, which ominously warned that our gravity may be weak because our matter phases in and out of another universe, Supermassive Black Holes, which ominously warned that a huge black hole could be approaching us even now, and Killer Asteroids, which ominously warned...well, you've undoubtedly seen Armageddon or Meteor or Deep Impact or one of those National Geographic specials about what happened to the dinosaurs. They weren't really that ominous -- the first one in particular was very interesting, since it was about problems with string theory when it came to the Big Bang -- but they all had a penchant for overly dramatic music whenever black holes or asteroids were mentioned, which just makes me snicker. If I have to choose between dying in a nuclear holocaust or a human-caused environmental crisis versus dying from a giant meteor, I'll take the meteor.

I wrote a whole rant about Polanski that I somehow lost when I saved a draft of this entry, which is fine because I don't actually feel like arguing the point -- let me just say that if you want to call me an American philistine or whatever Mitterrand called us, fine, I'd much rather be a philistine than a confessed rapist whining that he's being unfairly persecuted just because he drugged and brutalized a child. The fact that she would rather get her name out of the news once and for all, rather than making sure he is brought to the justice he has eluded for so long in the hope of making an example so other famous men don't believe they can do the same thing to other young girls and get away with it, does not change a thing.