By Jacqueline Osherow
My sixteenth
egret from
the window
of this train,
white against
the marshes'
shocking green
cushioning
Long Island
Sound from
Kingston down
to Mystic against
the shoreline's
erratic discipline:
the egret so
completely
still, the colors
so extreme,
the window
of my train
might be rolling
out a scroll
of meticulous
ancient Chinese
painting: my heart-
beat down its side
in liquid characters:
no tenses, no
conjunctions, just
emphatic strokes
on paper from
the inner bark
of sandalwood:
egret, marshes,
the number
sixteen: white
and that essential
shocking green-
perhaps even
the character
for kingfisher
green balanced
with jade white
in ancient poems-
every other element
implicit in the
brush strokes'
elliptic fusion
of calm and motion,
assuring as my
train moves on
and marsh gives way
to warehouses
and idle factories
that my sixteen
egrets still remain:
each a crescent
moon against
an emerald sky,
alabaster on
kingfisher green,
its body motionless
on one lithe leg,
cradling its
surreptitious
wings
--------
Happy Ostara! I promised Daniel Indian buffet while he was home for spring break, so on Wednesday we picked up Paul and went to Minerva, which had several desserts as well as lots of the usual good stuff (sambar, saag paneer, dal makhani, naan, some kind of tandoori eggplant that was awesome, and the other two aren't vegetarians so they had chicken and other things). I dragged Daniel on a couple of shopping chores on the way home, but otherwise that was our big excursion of the equinox, though I did take a walk and see a bunny in front of our neighbor's daffodils.
We had shawarma for dinner with Persian rice for Nowruz, the Persian New Year (none of us is Persian but Jews in Tehran celebrate it, which is good enough for me), then we watched some NCAA basketball before The Americans, which is very well-written and well-acted and always leaves me very agitated so I wish it was on earlier in the evening though it is very much a 10 p.m. show. It's not a 'shipper-friendly show, since absolutely everyone in a functional relationship is in some way using the person they're with. Here are some photos of the beaver dam network at Lake Needwood last month:
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