Poem for Friday and Earlier Spring at Brookside

Face Down
By Mary Karr

What are you doing on this side of the dark?
You chose that side, and those you left
feel your image across their sleeping lids
as a blinding atomic blast.
Last we knew,
you were suspended midair
like an angel for a pageant off the room
where your wife slept. She had
to cut you down who'd been (I heard)
so long holding you up. We all tried to,
faced with your need, which we somehow
understood and felt for and took
into our veins like smack. And you
must be lured by that old pain smoldering
like woodsmoke across the death boundary.
Prowl here, I guess, if you have to bother somebody.
Or, better yet, go bother God, who shaped
that form you despised from common clay.
That light you swam so hard away from
still burns, like a star over a desert or atop
a tree in a living room where a son’s photos
have been laid face down for the holiday.

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For National Poetry Month, The Washington Post had several designers put poems to motion. This one was animated by Charlie Brand at that link, if you'd like to watch.

Thursday involved folding laundry, being pursued by cats, and trying to work on my Voyager review while returning phone calls that kept giving me an excuse not to work on it (it's "Macrocosm" which is not exactly the most intellectual episode of Star Trek ever produced). It was drizzly and chilly but kind of nice to see so much color around the neighborhood in that kind of weather.

We watched the beginning of the NFL draft, though I don't know anything about the guy the Ravens picked except that he was wearing a very impressive suit. Then we watched The 100, which was awesome and terrible (ABBY, NO! MARCUS, NOOOOO! Jaha, I hate you more than Pike) and Orphan Black (Alison is my hero and if she were on The 100, she would be Heda). From Brookside Gardens last month: