Poem for Friday

The Pope's Penis
By Sharon Olds

It hangs deep in his robes, a delicate
clapper at the center of a bell.
It moves when he moves, a ghostly fish in a
halo of silver seaweed, the hair
swaying in the dark and the heat-and at night,
while his eyes sleep, it stands up
in praise of God.

--------

I spent a delightful afternoon with , who forgave me for not having anything exciting to feed her and brought Buffy the Vampire Slayer seasons one and five. First we had to get my irritable DVD player working; it had decided it was a Region 2 player, and rejected all my professional discs with a "Wrong Region" warning, requiring that the machine be restored to factory settings -- something not easy to learn from the minimal manual. But we figured it out, and then we watched "Teacher's Pet" and "Never Kill a Boy on the First Date" (which I had not seen before, never having watched the first season), plus "Checkpoint" (which I had seen, but it's one of the best ever, with the Council of Watchers and Glory and how Buffy lays the smackdown on everyone and how Giles adoring her).


A turkey stealing food from a calf in a barn at South Mountain Creamery.


Since it was Fall Harvest Celebration weekend, there were cheese samples...


...and containers of cream to be shaken by hand to make take-home servings of butter.


A singer was performing in the large barn...


...where there were also ice cream samples, farm toys, and historic farm equipment.


This calf was only a couple of weeks old. You can see some of the adult cows behind her, outside near the dairy delivery trucks.


These two calves were sharing a stall, and a water bucket.


Alpacas don't live at South Mountain Creamery, but these (plus yarn made from their wool) were visiting from a nearby farm.

I am liking FlashForward a lot, though I feel like that could turn on a dime if they killed off the wrong character in the wrong way or just screwed around and dragged things out too long. Right now the pacing is terrific and I like all the characters; I like that the men are as focused on their relationships as the women, and the women as focused on their careers as the men, and it's a reasonably diverse cast without too many obvious stereotypes. I particularly love Janis (the actress who plays her is terrific too), and I really like the Mark/Olivia/Lloyd triangle complicated by Dylan and Charlie's obvious attachment...it's messy and interesting and Lloyd obviously has all sorts of secrets much worse than the ones Mark is keeping from Olivia, so she's contemplating leaving one man she can't trust for one with with bigger skeletons in his closet.

I can't say that I enjoyed the World Series tonight, but a lot can happen in Philadelphia!