Poem for Friday and Homestead Goats

Rhapsody
By Aditi Machado

                           —or rhubarb?

Scant difference between some flowers
and the heads of cauliflowers the fingers get
herbaceous rubbing against. If I could get
ecstatic I would by the low soft
weeds, the hard oracular orifices of tree bark.
Some landscapes under duress
predict this atonal sky.
 
Scant difference between flowers.
The canned cool metal slightly
curves, of trash receptacles,
meadow interregna, strange
fanciful flights, toward toward.
 
Where the rhubarb field is not so bright
red as you would think, not so precise
or fulminating, too much green sticks
out, stems and leaves like a fuzz
of voices, watery incarnadine,

here where the sounds so simplify
the milieu into that wetness there,
 
here I stumble
to approximate the durations of others, to appear
of the same time as though of space,
I worry terribly, I hesitate, I lose my measure, a juice
trickles down my side,
 
रस ರಸ.
 
Like
I get I’m out of tune.

 -------- 

I had a quiet Yom Kippur during which I did no traditional atoning, at least not in Hebrew or in a group setting, though it seems like there's a lot of that going around this year. Instead I did some reading and chatted with some friends and tried to figure out what to do about a complicated situation with a neighbor who's a friend, who is ill and apparently resisting treatment (not with covid, she's vaccinated). We had dinner during a rainstorm with my parents to break the fast, though none of us had been fasting. 

Then we came home and I half-watched the Giants-Washington football game while chatting with fannish friends, after which we took a break for What We Do In the Shadows (in Atlantic City, hahaha). New York was winning when we put the game back on, but seemed determined to lose, and penalty after penalty let Washington get back in the game and win with a second chance at a field goal after time had expired, so that was fun! Here are a goat and kid we met at Homestead Farm last weekend: