Thursday, September 01, 2011

Poem for Thursday, Sherlocks, Wild Zoo

Birch
By Cynthia Zarin

Bone-spur, stirrup of veins—white colt
a tree, sapling bone again, worn to a splinter,
a steeple, the birch aground

in its ravine of leaves. Abide with me, arrive
at its skinned branches, its arms pulled
from the sapling, your wrist taut,

each ganglion a gash in the tree's rent
trunk, a child's hackwork, love plus love,
my palms in your fist, that

trio a trident splitting the birch, its bark
papyrus, its scars calligraphy,
a ghost story written on

winding sheets, the trunk bowing, dead is
my father
, the birch reading the news
of the day aloud as if we hadn't

heard it, the root moss lit gas,
like the veins on your ink-stained hand—
the birch all elbows, taking us in.

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Not a lot to report from my Wednesday -- beautiful weather, deer in the woods near the house, review of "The Practical Joker" for Friday 3/4 finished because I'm expecting company the next two days and have Adam's back to school night on Thursday night. I exchanged text messages with Daniel about bank accounts and book-buying and e-mail with Adam's guidance counselor and the high school art teacher because he is hoping to switch into a painting class, having enjoyed the one he took this summer at Glen Echo...there is now one space in the morning class, but he would have to switch which period he has Chinese and he has a friend in his current Chinese class so I think he is conflicted.

I took Adam to his first official cross country meet today, which he seemed to think went well. Daniel's building has had no cable since the hurricane went through and took down many of College Park's power lines, so we have been collecting DVDs for him. Tonight we ended up watching Sherlock Holmes which was one he said he wanted (we guessed that Inception and Avatar might be as well)...I want to know why a Victorian era Sherlock Holmes film has female characters who are so much more compelling than the ones on the modern-era Sherlock (yet it's still just as delightfully homoerotic). Here are some more zoo photos from last weekend:

















Google is pissing me off so much...forgetting the company politics, in addition to shutting down Slide they have made changes to Google Docs and Blogger that make it ten times more difficult to do things that used to take ten seconds. Maybe it's easier for mobile users but I am frustrated enough to be thinking of switching my blog to Wordpress as Adam did. Urgh. Happy September!

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