Poem for Saturday and Ocean on the Radio

Magnolia
By Gerald Stern

The mayor, in order to marry us, borrowed
a necktie from a lawyer which, on him,
looked stupid and kept his eye on a red pigeon
which somehow got in to coo her disappointment,
if only for the record, though one of the two
witnesses who kicked the red got only what
she deserved and that was that, except that the
rain cooed too, but we didn't give a shit
for we had a bed, for God's sake, with two tin buckets
of blossoms waiting for us; and someone there
of Greek persuasion enacted the dancing though somewhat
lickerish and turned to reading the names of the dead
from World War I the other side of the bandstand
but we didn't care nor did we know her name
nor where she came from or what the necktie or what
our love had to do with it anyhow, mostly nothing.

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I had a perfectly lovely Friday. I got up early to work on a review of "The Storyteller", a Deep Space Nine episode that I really think is pretty poor so I didn't worry too much about rushing the review. Then Paul came home at lunchtime and we went downtown to the offices of SiriusXM because we had won tickets to go see Jennifer Cutting's Ocean Orchestra record a live concert for The Village channel. It was absolutely lovely -- much of the music we've heard them perform at Convergence Lab last winter and at the Birchmere a couple of weeks ago, but this is by far the most intimate setting in which we've seen them -- there were perhaps 35 people in the room counting the sound engineers -- and songs like "Fall, Leaves, Fall" and "Time To Remember the Poor" are more overwhelming in such a small space. Lisa had a cold but she sounded gorgeous anyway. Plus I had the unexpected pleasure of seeing Twistedchick at the concert. No photos were allowed in the studio but I snapped a few walking through the SiriusXM corridors -- each channel has its own closed office themed to the music and there are lots of photos and autographs of performers.









We retrieved the kids and had dinner with my parents -- lasagna, which my mother made three of for the beef eaters, the turkey eaters, and the vegetarians -- then came home for Nikita, which is back to being awesome after starting to lose my attention (the regulars were all scattered but they're not any more, and the presence of Alberta Watson is always an excellent thing). After that, we put on PBS and watched Everest: A Climb For Peace, a documentary narrated by Orlando Bloom about a group of climbers including an Israeli and a Palestinian who wanted to conquer Everest together to prove that difficult tasks like ending decades of fighting can be accomplished with teamwork. The Palestinian ended up having to turn back before the summit attempt because of altitude sickness and the South African almost died on the way down -- there were nine climbers of five different faiths, including a Christian American woman and a Buddhist Sherpa from Nepal, led by an atheist from New Zealand. It was quite uplifting apart from the climbing horrors, like people losing fingertips to frostbite.