By Paisley Rekdal
unveil themselves in dark.
They hang, each a jagged,
silken sleeve, from moonlit rafters bright
as polished knives. They swim
the muddled air and keen
like supersonic babies, the sound
we imagine empty wombs might make
in women who can't fill them up.
A clasp, a scratch, a sigh.
They drink fruit dry.
And wheel, against feverish light flung hard
upon their faces,
in circles that nauseate.
Imagine one at breast or neck,
Patterning a name in driblets of iodine
that spatter your skin stars.
They flutter, shake like mystics.
They materialize. Revelatory
as a stranger's underthings found tossed
upon the marital bed, you tremble
even at the thought. Asleep,
you tear your fingers
and search the sheets all night.
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Post-Halloween Tuesday was pretty quiet. Paul sprained his ankle jogging and worked from home to avoid driving or walking on it, so I got to have lunch with him, but we were mostly working in different rooms and didn't even see all that much of each other. I didn't get out of the house until it was time to drive Adam to tennis, which was glorious for me since it was the last week I could walk in Cabin John Park during his lesson; next weekend the clocks go back and it will be too dark during his lesson, woe. This afternoon the woods were full of chipmunks, squirrels, downy woodpeckers, and other animals stocking up for winter, and there was a senior baseball team practicing on the field where the Big Train warmed up in the summer.
We skipped Glee to watch the second part of a PBS special on royal weddings -- this half was about the Queen's children (the Queen Mother, Queen, and Princess Margaret were in the first half). I don't remember Princess Anne's wedding so that was all new to me, and I thought they did a lovely piece on Charles and Camilla, whose wedding was far more low-key than Charles and Diana's but seems much less contrived from this perspective (I like that her ex-husband was there). Then we watched Ringer, which is finally going somewhere, and the end of the insane 500-point Toledo/Northern Illinois game. Here are some more photos of my family enjoying Kings Dominion:
The Volcano flips Adam and his friend around.
Here they are flying on swings...
...and here, driving Paul and myself on the Blue Ridge Tollway.
Paul rode with them on the Ricochet; if I hadn't been fighting a sun-related headache, I would have, too.
The boys stood up on Shockwave, which I wouldn't have gone on no matter what!
Same goes for Dominator, where it seems people were upside down more than right side up.
I did pose beside one of the faux warriors near the Volcano (see why I had a sun issue?).
I did not win anything as awesome as a giant whale, but I did win the little plastic turtles at lower left while playing Skee-Ball.
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