Poem for Monday and Renwick Gallery

You Were You Are Elegy
By Mary Jo Bang

Fragile like a child is fragile.
Destined not to be forever.
Destined to become other
To mother. Here I am
Sitting on a chair, thinking
About you. Thinking
About how it was
To talk to you.
How sometimes it was wonderful
And sometimes it was awful.
How drugs when drugs were
Undid the good almost entirely
But not entirely
Because good could always be seen
Glimmering like lame glimmers
In the window of a shop
Called Beautiful
Things Never Last Forever.
I loved you. I love you. You were.
And you are. Life is experience.
It's all so simple. Experience is
The chair we sit on.
The sitting. The thinking
Of you where you are a blank
To be filled
In by missing. I loved you.
I love you like I love
All beautiful things.
True beauty is truly seldom.
You were. You are
In May. May now is looking onto
The June that is coming up.
This is how I measure
The year. Everything Was My Fault
Has been the theme of the song
I've been singing,
Even when you've told me to quiet.
I haven't been quiet.
I've been crying. I think you
Have forgiven me. You keep
Putting your hand on my shoulder
When I'm crying.
Thank you for that. And
For the ineffable sense
Of continuance. You were. You are
The brightest thing in the shop window
And the most beautiful seldom I ever saw.

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Adam's good friend Robert, whom those of you who have read this blog for a long time have seen in photos from track meets and school dances and vacations and college, lost his battle on Saturday with the brain tumor from which he has been suffering for several years. So we had a sad, distracted Sunday, though we did some nice things too. We had brunch with my parents, sister and niece, then we went downtown to the Renwick Gallery to see exhibits including Rick Araluce's The Final Stop, in which a gallery is filled with a model of an underground subway platform complete with sound and vibration; Murder Is Her Hobby, a collection of Frances Glessner Lee's miniature crime scenes to train homicide investigators; Parallax Gap, an architectural firm's experiment to portray iconic American buildings from skewed vantage points; and, from the permanent collection, Connections: Contemporary Craft at the Renwick Gallery:

















Adam took a nap in the late afternoon and I went out to pick up some DVDs about astronomy that a neighbor was freecycling, then we watched the end of the delightful Pittsburgh-Jacksonville game until the Jaguars had it well in hand. We went out to dinner after halftime of the Minnesota-New Orleans game, had lots of excellent Thai basil and orange tofu at Grand Fusion, then came home for the amazing end in which we thought the Vikings had it won, then thought the Saints had it won, then saw the Vikings win on the last play followed by chaos since the extra point had to be snapped if not kicked. We debated watching several serious dramas but decided we needed a mindless, shamefully rude movie and we ended up watching Tropic Thunder, which it's hard to say whether the movie is stupidly offensive or is just bang-on at pointing out and scoffing at things serious dramas do in Hollywood over and over that are offensive.