By Margo Berdeshevsky
This is the place. No chairs.
A woman who is choosing
has sent a petal from her bloom
of conscious closing.
The woman who is choosing when
-scratches vellum. The rook stands.
The woman in the nest of
the phoenix hovers nearer
her edge like that brood of birthing
opal-throated pigeons in an empty
flower trough,
thirsty, one stair above my sill,
breaking their shells one by
one. She repeats
my words
from dusk in a jungle where
medicine leaned small against thorn trees.
Each poison growing in a forest
lives beside its antidote, we said.
I am still eager, I said.
Or the scent of hyacinth.
The woman remembering, who is
choosing when to die will
curl before leaves have blood-burned September.
Surrender by starvation,
she doesn't name her illness
only how many days.
Three more. The woman
in worn white cotton washed us in a tide pool,
brewed petals, shouted under
egrets at the edge of rain. Bon voyage to me & love
life as you live it she scribbles blue before her breath
ends a night and a day and the broken slant
dawn.
The woman who was choosing when to die.
Too young to be skeletal, skin taken wing.
Bone no longer needed. Dove.
Fire-eyed. Distant. Opal.
The root does not care
where her water comes from.
Here is another thirsty body.
Broken into morning.
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I had an early appointment with the ophthalmologist on Wednesday, meaning that I was stuck in the office for over an hour and a half and was then half-blind for a couple of hours after having my pupils dilated. So I went to the mall to get Father's Day cards, to get wallflowers at the Bath & Body Works semi-annual sale, and to check out Brighton's sale (not enough discount and nothing I desperately wanted anyway). Then I stopped at CVS for boring stuff and came home, only to find that Daniel was not yet out of bed.
Since Adam is all but finished with school and Daniel already saw it with my father, we went to see Star Trek: Into Darkness. In keeping with the "if you don't have anything nice to say..." philosophy, I shall only say nice things, including 1) I did not hate it as much as the first reboot film; 2) I thought Cumberbatch was better than in anything else I've seen him in; 3) the jumping-on-flying-cars bit wasn't as boring as the one in Attack of the Clones; 4) the retconning made me laugh instead of scream.
TThe plot made little sense to me, which I thought meant I was getting old, but Daniel assured me that several things I thought were plot holes were in fact plot holes, and Adam was singing "My Heart Will Go On" in old-style Cylon voice about how Spock felt during The Scene Stolen From The Wrath of Khan, so I am afraid Kirk's big scene now makes me giggle, if Spock's Shatnerian shouting wasn't enough to set that off. I rooted for the villain for most of the movie since Scotty committed the same crime as the villain against a lower-ranking Starfleet officer. No morals, lots of militarism. Give me the worst TNG episode any day.
Some National Zoo animals from last weekend:
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