Poem for Wednesday, Black Hill, We Bought a Zoo

The Future is an Animal
By Tina Chang

In every kind of dream I am a black wolf
careening through a web. I am the spider
who eats the wolf and inhabits the wolf's body.
In another dream I marry the wolf and then
am very lonely. I seek my name and they name me
Lucky Dragon. I would love to tell you that all
of this has a certain ending but the most frightening
stories are the ones with no ending at all.
The path goes on and on. The road keeps forking,
splitting like an endless atom, splitting
like a lip, and the globe is on fire. As many
times as the book is read, the pages continue
to grow, multiply. They said, In the beginning,
and that was the moral of the original and most
important story. The story of man. One story.
I laid my head down and my head was heavy.
Hair sprouted through the skin, hair black
and bending toward night grass. I was becoming
the wolf again, my own teeth breaking
into my mouth for the first time, a kind of beauty
to be swallowed in interior bite and fever.
My mind a miraculous ember until I am the beast.
I run from the story that is faster than me,
the words shatter and pant to outchase me.
The story catches my heels when I turn
to love its hungry face, when I am willing
to be eaten to understand my fate.

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My Tuesday was mostly about work, holiday projects, and laundry -- when I could get into the laundry room, a task made difficult by two enormous camel crickets determined to make me run back upstairs screaming. I did successfully extract two loads by early afternoon, which I folded while watching We Bought a Zoo, which I figured I would probably like just for the zoo parts even if the script was mediocre. I expected lots of bad animal humor and was surprised that it's actually much more a drama and quite sad, with a dose of histrionics involving the teenage characters. I can see why it wasn't a box office success -- lots of talk about death interspersed with occasional cute animals -- but I thought Damon and Johansson were good in it, though everyone else seemed pretty over the top to me.

Paul picked up Adam on his way home since it was raining in the morning so Adam didn't bike to school, and they arrived at the same time. We had veggie bratwursts for dinner and gave the cats some of the new Friskies food that we took out for Rosie originally to try to tempt her to eat when she was sick, then discovered that all three cats will whine piteously for it. Then we watched Calendar Girls, which Delta loaned me -- I loved it, both the storyline (senior girl power being something never seen in Hollywood films except as comic relief) and the acting, particularly Mirren, Walters, Celie Imrie and Penelope Wilton. Here are some photos from Black Hill Regional Park a couple of weekends ago, while there were still lots of colored leaves on the trees!