Poem for Friday and Baltimore Flowers

Unbidden
By Rae Armantrout

The ghosts swarm.
They speak as one
person. Each
loves you. Each
has left something
undone.

          •

Did the palo verde
blush yellow
all at once?

Today's edges
are so sharp

they might cut
anything that moved.

          •

The way a lost
word

will come back
unbidden.

You're not interested
in it now,

only
in knowing
where it's been.

--------

Armantrout's Versed won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry earlier this week.

It was a gorgeous 70-degree spring day in the DC area, and I got to have lunch with Vertigo66! We went to California Pizza Kitchen, where we shared hummus and I had the fabulous Moroccan Chicken Salad without the chicken, and she gave me chocolate from La Maison du Chocolat in Paris and showed me some of her photos and made me very jealous. Afterward I walked around Washingtonian Lake, where there were many geese but no goslings yet, and stopped in Target for household stuff, plus Bath & Body Works where today's loot was a free travel size Twilight Woods shower gel. In the afternoon Adam had tennis, so I dropped him off and took some photos around the neighborhood of the azaleas that have started to bloom. These photos are from the botanic gardens in Baltimore and nearby Druid Hill Lake:

















I know a lot of people think FlashForward is silly and I agree that their portrayal of FBI procedure is pretty ridiculous, but the show never bores me and I really like all the characters, even the characters I don't like -- spoilers -- I'm so upset that, now that we know Janis and Demetri actually did it, it's also obvious that she's going to be the one to shoot him, though I'm betting he doesn't die because he's a fantastic character and John Cho demonstrated tonight that the series really needs his subtlety to balance Joseph Fiennes. I still want Mark, Olivia, and Lloyd to live in a happy menage with their children. I am at the point, though, where I am wondering if they planned out the full season in advance -- I have my doubts -- and if so whether they have any sort of plan for another season. Afterward we watched Next Gen's "Face of the Enemy," which rocked as much as I'd remembered -- why didn't they let Marina Sirtis have more storylines like that?