Poem for Tuesday and Poplar Spring Animals

Absence
By Elizabeth Jennings

I visited the place where we last met.
Nothing was changed, the gardens were well-tended,
The fountains sprayed their usual steady jet;
There was no sign that anything had ended
And nothing to instruct me to forget.

The thoughtless birds that shook out of the trees,
Singing an ecstasy I could not share,
Played cunning in my thoughts. Surely in these
Pleasures there could not be a pain to bear
Or any discord shake the level breeze.

It was because the place was just the same
That made your absence seem a savage force,
For under all the gentleness there came
An earthquake tremor: Fountain, birds and grass
Were shaken by my thinking of your name.

--------

I did not have an exciting Monday, though I managed to fix the broken drawer in Adam's bedroom dresser (it will probably even hold together as long as nothing heavier than a couple of handkerchiefs get put in it instead of the 15 heavy textbooks son had in there) and I got laundry and vacuuming done. It is upsetting to have to worry about having a kid in San Francisco at risk not even from drug crime in the city but from neo-Nazis at food festivals.

Around baseball (Nationals went up early, Orioles are losing late on the west coast), we watched the last two episodes of the season of Burden of Truth, which I am glad is coming back -- the twists in the courtroom stretched credulity even taking into account that I don't know the finer points of the Canadian court system, but I like all the women and hope they keep up the First Nations storylines. Some animals and folk singers from Poplar Spring Animal Sanctuary: