Poem for Wednesday and Canal Turtles

The Adventures of a Turtle
By Russell Edson

The turtle carries his house on his back. He is both the house and the person of that house.
           But actually, under the shell is a little room where the true turtle, wearing long underwear, sits at a little table. At one end of the room a series of levers sticks out of slots in the floor, like the controls of a steam shovel. It is with these that the turtle controls the legs of his house.
           Most of the time the turtle sits under the sloping ceiling of his turtle room reading catalogues at the little table where a candle burns. He leans on one elbow, and then the other. He crosses one leg, and then the other. Finally he yawns and buries his head in his arms and sleeps.
           If he feels a child picking up his house he quickly douses the candle and runs to the control levers and activates the legs of his house and tries to escape.
           If he cannot escape he retracts the legs and withdraws the so-called head and waits. He knows that children are careless, and that there will come a time when he will be free to move his house to some secluded place, where he will relight his candle, take out his catalogues and read until at last he yawns. Then he’ll bury his head in his arms and sleep....That is, until another child picks up his house....

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I don't even know where Tuesday went, apart from an hour looking for a photo that I never found despite checking all three floors of the house, so I'll just jump to evening, when we watched the film of The Deep Blue Sea because I wanted to watch it after having seen the recording of the play with Helen McCrory. For some reason I found the characters easier to relate to in the film, maybe because the ages seemed more appropriate for the characters (Rachel Weisz seems closer in age to Tom Hiddleston than Simon Russell Beale even though she's actually 11 years older than the former and 9 years younger than the latter) and the subplot with the expecting couple was cut in favor of more background with the husband and his mother. Plus it felt less strictly British -- there was more yelling and crying -- despite more obvious visual metaphors for rebuilding after the war. Meanwhile it's late and I can't even with the RNC so have some Pennyfield Lock turtles: