Poem for Monday and Smithsonian Exhibits

A Fox's Tail is Called a Brush
By Emily Pettit

There is the room I will pretend does not exist,
for now. For now that room does not exist.
Really remember colors reflected in pools of water.
The marshaling of evidence. Cats of what colors.
A spectrum. Color to describe the cat that is down.
That cat that is to the side. With one eye. What is
scratch made up of? A florescent rhibisom is working
on figuring it out. Figuring it out in a mouse's mind.
I break up all the leaves into bits. I am hard at summer.
Let the music loud! I can have a color in my mind
and I cannot make it. How do you make a mirror?
I want you to understand. Do you understand me?
I understand. They understand. You understand.
I hope your summer is being a good summer.
Grasses and radios. Get archaic. A hunter looking
for a streaming blue. You were in the weather.
You idea. A not new idea. A room. I got home
and my door was blue. It was a fox and a picture
of you.

--------

Sunday's weather was as beautiful as Saturday's, and after a quiet morning while younger son played tennis with my father, we picked up both parents and went downtown to the Freer and Sackler Galleries and the Ripley Center to see Hokusai's screens and Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, the Peacock Room, Winged Spirits: Birds in Chinese Painting, and -- for something completely different -- The Patents and Trademarks of Steve Jobs: Art and Technology that Changed the World. (I wasn't terribly impressed with the latter but it definitely shows that you should be a possessive control freak if you want to be insanely wealthy.) We had the Peacock Room all to ourselves with a security guard who knew a lot about the porcelain; the Mount Fuji prints were magnificent but the exhibit was mobbed since it was the last day.















We came home for a little while so that younger son could walk the neighbor's dogs, then went to my parents' for a barbecue at which my mother made veggie and beef hot dogs and burgers (Paul had made pecan pie, which was what he wanted for Father's Day and he makes it better than any we can buy around here). After we came home, we talked to my in-laws and tried to reach Paul's middle brother since it's his birthday, then watched a couple of episodes of Relic Hunter, which older son is enjoying as much as I am. I am reading Rupert Everett's autobiography as my Mindless In the Car Book and I have to admit that I am howling aloud through most of it, though everyone who's discussed in it says he made a lot of it up!