Thursday, March 26, 2015

Poem for Thursday and Château de Chenonceau

If You Must Hide Yourself From Love
By Christopher Salerno


It is important to face the rear of the train
as it leaves the republic. Not that all

departing is yearning. First love is
a factory. We sleep in a bed that had once

been a tree. Nothing is forgot.
Yet facts, over time, lose their charm,

warned a dying Plato. You have to isolate
the lies you love. Are we any less

photorealistic? I spot in someone's Face-
book sonogram a tiny dictum

full of syllogisms. One says: all kisses come
down to a hole in the skull,

toothpaste and gin; therefore your eyes
are bull, your mouth is a goal.

--------

I am very pleased to report that all our trip laundry has been washed, dried, and folded! That was no small accomplishment while I am trying to get all my best France photos edited and uploaded so I can use my free Shutterfly coupon to make a photo album before the end of the week. I am about halfway through creating the book and impressed with my photos of Paris in the haze, though less impressed with how my photos in the catacombs came out. I don't have all my clothes and scarves and the four decks of playing cards that are my major souvenirs put away yet, but I am working on it!

Tonight I have spent hours at war with both my computers, desktop and laptop, apparently because Windows changed some setting in their latest mandatory update that seems to have affected my firewall, because suddenly I can't FTP or log in to Google Music Manager (the programs allege that I am not connected to the internet when I am; according to several web forums, I am supposed to open Port 80 and Port 443 to fix this, but at this hour I am too tired to figure out how to do that, let alone how they got closed in the first place or whether that IS really why I can't upload music).

Here are some photos of the Château de Chenonceau in the Loire Valley, which is not only extraordinary beautiful inside and out -- the castle spans the River Cher, which has swans and herons along the banks, and has gorgeous restored rooms with fresh flowers in most of them, plus it has a hedge maze on the grounds -- but also served as a means of fleeing the Nazis because the long gallery let people escape from the occupied side of the river to the free zone on the other bank. Francis I and Henri II both slept here, as did Catherine de' Medici, who had to share it with her husband's lover.
















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