By Robert Ostrom
What you said I shattered was the window
but we both know what you meant. I can’t
recall a single meadow that didn’t slow my pulse.
Though you are far you are on my wing: you
are the sight of an apple in the bathroom
or oils unintended for a wood floor. A fence
ran the length of a field, between two trees
so that, in snow, it looked like stitches
or a fallen rope ladder. Did you know
that three hundred years ago the heart was
a furnace? At this point what else can I do
but follow the precedent I’ve established?
Choose one of the following: at Monticello,
the turnips gave me a toothache, or at Red
Hook, the red bees. Will you laugh if I say, I
beat my heart into a red caul of sentences?
Near the pond I lifted a rock and found life
under it crowded with so many urges. To see
if it’s possible to dig a grave, today I took
a shovel to the field. It is possible and surprisingly
easy to dig a grave! Over coffee, on the phone,
I said to you, it took trillions to prop up
the markets, but what I wanted to say was, I have
beaten my heart into a red caul of sentences.
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Both my kids are here, possibly for the only night this calendar year, and we're discussing taxes and printing 3D fractals while watching Mad Max: Fury Road, which Daniel hadn't seen, so I will keep this short. My morning was taken up with finishing a review of Voyager's original series crossover Captain Sulu episode "Flashback", which I posted while we ate lunch and caught up on The 100 and Elementary.
Then we went to College Park to bring back Adam and Christine for dinner so that on Saturday, we can "celebrate the holidays" with Paul's parents as we were unable to do in December since Daniel wasn't on this coast. We're supposed to get a bit of snow tonight, so here are a couple of photos of Great Falls during the past few weeks -- last weekend when the water was cresting and a month or so earlier when more rock was showing in the Potomac River:
High Water
Lower Water
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