Poem for Tuesday and Orchids

Dream IV
By Gerald Stern

I am so laden I grieve at 3 A.M.
over two parking spaces I could have claimed
or am fully frightened in a basement room choosing
a Nobel laureate among the nine Israelis
upstairs, especially when their phone call says
you don't have anything to be frightened of; nor would
I choose a Jubu, nor would I choose someone
with a ring in her tongue for it says in Numbers that
tin coated with silver is against the law
of mixing metals, such as we can't cook peppers
in a steel pot for steel is what we put
in a horse's mouth and what we make swords of
by dipping iron in oxide in the first place,
though it was no accident deliberately tipping wood
or fusing, as they did, Jewish and German
genius and German and Jewish chemicals
underground, and in the desert, I say fuck you
to fusion and I say let them fight with iron,
better with bronze, or better yet with wood,
or air, oh let them fight with air, drop air
from B100s, consider it, Kissinger.

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From this week's New Yorker.

I had a fairly unexciting Monday -- went to the Container Store to get boxes with drawers and spent a lot of the afternoon reorganizing in my bedroom -- jewelry in the drawers, boxes on top of the bookcases, Star Trek books that had been there in bags to be given away to various people. Now my bedroom looks marginally less cluttered -- meaning it only looks cluttered, as opposed to my basement which looks terrifying. For dinner Paul decided that in honor of George Washington's birthday, we should eat what George would have eaten, so for dinner he made peanut soup, spoon bread with honey, and mashed sweet potatoes with coconut, which were served together at a feast at Mount Vernon where the menu was documented; we skipped the Virginia ham with oyster sauce. Happy Birthday George! Here are some orchids from the US Botanic Garden, from whose front door one can see the Washington Monument downtown:

















I was all set to root for Davis/White to win the ice dancing gold medal, particularly when they came out skating to Phantom -- I first heard Michael Crawford sing because of ice dance, when he was doing Barnum in London (I'd had the Jim Dale recording from New York) and Torvill and Dean skated to that music -- but Virtue/Moir were absolutely gorgeous, graceful and passionate, so it's fine with me that they got the gold. I was hoping that Belbin/Agosto would manage to get the bronze, but I must admit the Russians skated beautifully (I know he was injured for a lot of the season), and Belbin could not have been more gracious in defeat; certain other Russians could take a lesson from her. The most moving moment of the evening, though, might have been Kevin Pearce's mother and brother talking about his snowboarding injury and how living in a family with a child with Down's Syndrome has taught them to count small blessings.

And in case anyone needs to know, tomorrow is free pancake day at IHOP!