Poem for Thursday and Courtyards Moving Day

The Daughter Goes To Camp
By Sharon Olds

In the taxi alone, home from the airport,
I could not believe you were gone. My palm kept
creeping over the smooth plastic
to find your strong meaty little hand and
squeeze it, find your narrow thigh in the
noble ribbing of the corduroy,
straight and regular as anything in nature, to
find the slack cool cheek of a
child in the heat of a summer morning—
nothing, nothing, waves of bawling
hitting me in hot flashes like some
change of life, some boiling wave
rising in me toward your body, toward
where it should have been on the seat, your
brow curved like a cereal bowl, your
eyes dark with massed crystals like the
magnified scales of a butterfly's wing, the
delicate feelers of your limp hair,
floods of blood rising in my face as I
tried to reassemble the hot
gritty molecules in the car, to
make you appear like a holograph
on the back seat, pull you out of nothing
as I once did—but you were really gone,
the cab glossy as a slit caul out of
which you had slipped, the air glittering
electric with escape as it does in the room at a birth.

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Paul and I spent a big chunk of Wednesday in College Park moving Adam's things out of the Courtyards, a momentous occasion in that our two kids each spent two years living there (and had pretty good experiences, though Adam says he has no nostalgia for his apartment). We made the mistake of not insisting that he bring some of his stuff here while he was commuting back and forth the past couple of weeks to see friends closer to home, so there was a lot to pack and clean and drag to the dumpster, but now it's all crammed in our basement until next fall, and we went to an extremely late lunch at Pho D'Lite before coming home in an unnecessary amount of traffic.

Adam is spending the evening at a movie marathon with the high school friends with whom he has had such marathons for several years -- I believe he brought The Nice Guys, which we saw a year ago today. Paul and I had sandwiches for dinner since we weren't very hungry after our late lunch out, then we watched the season though hopefully not series finale of Timeless, which we missed on Friday. It finished before the Capitals beat the Lightning to earn a trip to the Stanley Cup final, huzzah! Here are a few photos of Courtyards so I remember how the public spaces looked. Adam was not in the mood for posing, but you can see and read about him on one of his adventures here!