Poem for Tuesday, Sherlock Holmes at Washingtonian

The Woods in Concord
By Seth Abramson

                Down by the oaks tonight
you might still find a musket boys
but stay lively
for the feral cats in the underbrush.
In the forest we carved from a still
greater forest
there was the lesser forest
we lived in.
Have you seen the boys of means
up at the old stone brook,
they will say
you feel pretty narrow
for a good boy. They will ask you
if you fall every night,
and for what. You'll hear the story
of three decades of winter
and worse luck for someone else's
daddy. They will sell what they got
for free
and give up freely
anything no one else would buy.

Down at that tumbledown a boy
might find himself
a black charger with wet haunches—
no, it's a tree. But mark it,
the older ones
whinny, playing older in a fortress
up the canopy,
if we'd wanted to whittle you into
a gun, we could have,
if we'd wanted to light you up, we
could have,
if we'd wanted to strangle you here
in a crib of black twigs and moss
in the grim dark
behind your house, we could have.

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Paul has the week off, so since Daniel is home we figured we'd do a bunch of things together we often do at this time of year. The plan for today was a movie, then the winter lights at Seneca Creek State Park, but when we arrived at the park it turned out that the winter lights were closed on Monday, so we'll have to do that later in the week. We took Adam's girlfriend with us and walked around Washingtonian Lake before we went to the theater, which was sold out...as every other movie in the multiplex seemed to be, I've never seen it so crowded. I guess everyone is sick of relatives and overeating!

We all enjoyed Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows a lot. Yes, I know it's crack and not "real" Conan Doyle, but I don't care -- I love the interplay between the characters, I appreciate this Sherlock's awareness of his limitations (I'm sick to death of Sherlock's Sherlock's arrogance) and I love that the women get so much to do (again, in contrast both to traditional interpretations and to Sherlock's contemporary setting with same old misogyny). I am assuming that reports of a certain woman's death have been greatly exaggerated, and she will be back later, or I may be quite aggravated.

Adam is sleeping at a friend's since his early childhood friend from Venezuela is visiting and they are all doing stuff together in the morning. I thought we were going to have Seneca Creek winter lights photos so I took very few elsewhere today. Here are a few of the seagulls, geese, and ducks at Washingtonian Lake, plus one of Daisy suffering woefully in the winter weather.