By Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann
Jardin des Plantes, Paris
In these Fragonard-like mirrorings
no more of their white and pink
is proffered than if a man
said of his mistress: "So soft
she was with sleep." Then stepping up into the grass,
and standing, slightly turned, on pink stems,
blossoming together, as in a flowerbed,
they seduce themselves more seductively than
Phryne herself; and then, extending their necks,
burrow the paleness of their eyes into their own softness,
in which black and fruit-red lies hidden.
Immediately shrieks of jealousy go through the aviary;
but already, astonished, they have stretched themselves
and stride off one by one into the imaginary.
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Most of my chilly, overcast, depressing-for-a-spring-day Tuesday involved work and chores not worth discussing. I ran into a couple of friends panicking about getting their taxes done, though it turns out that the government is giving people an extra day to get them filed because the IRS web site crashed. Maddy was one of the people working on them, though I believe she put them in the mail this evening. I had lots of laundry to put away so I took the opportunity to switch out my clothes for the spring in the hope it will arrive.
Because I have tickets to see Rick Astley tomorrow night downtown, Cheryl, Paul, and I postponed our X-Men marathon for a couple of days so we could watch The Flash (extremely meh, please can the DeVos storyline be over already) and the Black Lightning season finale (wonderful, no white boys preaching about how Heroes Never Ever Kill People, a villain whose motto is "Make America Great Again"). I was really missing the Camargue, so from 2017, here are flamingoes at the Parc Ornithologique de Pont-de-Gau:
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