Poem for Friday

Mom as Fly
By Terese Svoboda

A fly with a human head
heads for your screen. It's Mom,
toting groceries and laundry

way too tiny. An interruption in scoring.
But first score a bill worth
the trouble. Mom! A twenty?

The fly mounts the monitor
and notes the debt to education
remains unpaid.

But past midnight theorems
are not her thing. Way faux,
as in eternal, those problems.

She hand-rubs. You crush her,
forgetting anguish might lead to food.
No buzz to you equals a fast connection,

where all relationships worship
the math, holy Pythagorean. But you
don't have the millions of eyes

she had to watch over something.
What was that something?
Your hand drifts to a pimple.

Could it be?
Dad decks you bad,
the triangle so over.

--------

It was not a very eventful Thursday around here. I did some chores, finished tampering with the photos I was working on yesterday so I could burn discs for my parents and sister, did some reading, wrote to my senators about two separate issues, and starting working on a review of Star Trek: The Next Generation's "The First Duty" which we all watched this evening, in honor of which I shall post some photos (reruns from several years ago) of the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in Van Nuys, California where my brother-in-law and his wife were married in the Japanese Garden in 2002, but which is probably better known to everyone reading this as Starfleet Academy.


Pelicans enjoy the evening at the Japanese Garden in the midst of the water filtration plant.


The administration building of the water reclamation project is recognizable as the administration building of Starfleet Academy...


...though the Academy is supposed to be in San Francisco, so the Golden Gate Bridge has been digitally inserted into the scene.


At least two species of egret live in the protected garden, the great egret...


...and the smaller, dark-billed snowy egret.


The gardens also have waterfalls, willow trees, and a garden-within-a-garden, the teahouse and tea garden (roji) where my brother in law had his wedding reception after the ceremony on the log bridge.


I love seeing all the birds amidst the plantings and lanterns.

I liked FlashForward a lot this week -- it's so nice to see someone who's a lesbian when it isn't merely a ratings ploy, and given the state of the world and everyone else's relationships, it doesn't bother me that she has issues with intimacy -- the joke about her vision of the future being on the space station having a three-way with Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin must definitely be taken as a deliberate distancing tactic once the snickering stops, but I like her ambivalence about whether she wants to be married, whether she wants to be a mother, why she's fine with a new lover going through her belongings yet feels violated when she finds out the new lover looked up her future. She interests me a lot more than the president with his predictable ex-mistress, Mark and his once and future drinking problem, or Demetri and his impending murder. Spoiler: I'm assuming she's not dead from that gunshot since she's listed in future episodes, which pleases me.

We have had to turn the Yankees-Angels game off twice tonight because every time we put it on, the Yankees come back. At least the Florida State-UNC game is close. I'm trying to decide whether to see Amelia this weekend despite the mediocre reviews (all the same complaints -- script so bombastic that only the film's score can compete, the actors can't do a thing with the overwrought lines -- basing anything about Earhart on Butler's bio instead of Rich's seems like a bad idea to me to begin with). Yet is there any chance I will not love a biopic about Earhart starring Swank, Gere, McGregor & Eccleston?

Adam shared this with me and made me laugh a lot.