By W. S. Di Piero
Trying to find my roost
one lidded, late afternoon,
the consolation of color
worked up like neediness,
like craving chocolate,
I'm at Art Institute favorites:
Velasquez's “Servant,”
her bashful attention fixed
to place things just right,
Beckmann's “Self-Portrait,”
whose fishy fingers seem
never to do a day's work,
the great stone lions outside
monumentally pissed
by jumbo wreaths and ribbons
municipal good cheer
yoked around their heads.
Mealy mist. Furred air.
I walk north across
the river, Christmas lights
crushed on skyscraper glass,
bling stringing Michigan Ave.,
sunlight's last-gasp sighing
through the artless fog.
Vague fatigued promise hangs
in the low darkened sky
when bunched scrawny starlings
rattle up from trees,
switchback and snag
like tossed rags dressing
the bare wintering branches,
black-on-black shining,
and I'm in a moment
more like a fore-moment:
from the sidewalk, watching them
poised without purpose,
I feel lifted inside the common
hazards and orders of things
when from their stillness,
the formal, aimless, not-waiting birds
erupt again, clap, elated weather-
making wing-clouds changing,
smithereened back and forth,
now already gone to follow
the river's running course.
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My day was entirely about chores, so I have nothing exciting to report -- laundry, picking up Adam whose bike tire was flat, post office (wait time about half and hour, which was bad but not as bad as it could have been, and all holiday cards and packages will be stamped and in the mail by morning so if your address has changed and you want to exchange cards, send me a message ASAP).
We watched a bit of women's basketball but weren't particularly in the mood, mostly because of the sportscasters rather than the game, so we watched the second Night at the Museum movie, which has lots of DC landmarks plus Amelia Earhart. Here are some photos from Richmond's VMFA of Chihuly's seaforms in three installations including a Persian ceiling and the huge Mille Fiori Laguna Torcello:
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