Wednesday, November 03, 2021

Poem for Wednesday and Brookside Gardens

First Frost
By Andrei Voznesensky
Translated by Stanley Kunitz

A girl is freezing in a telephone booth,
huddled in her flimsy coat,
her face stained by tears
and smeared with lipstick.

She breathes on her thin little fingers.
Fingers like ice. Glass beads in her ears.

She has to beat her way back alone
down the icy street.

First frost. A beginning of losses.
The first frost of telephone phrases.

It is the start of winter glittering on her cheek,
the first frost of having been hurt.

-------- 

It rained nearly all of Tuesday and was the first really chilly day of the fall, so I spent nearly all of it indoors. I still have lots of chores to catch up on and we picked up more boxes when we dropped off the last load of books at the library sale, so I packed a box of academic and history books and started sorting what's left of the sci-fi, which is largely magazine-based media books like Starlog's tie-ins. I think I may try to sell my complete sets of Hornblower and Jim Thompson novels on eBay. 

After dinner, I watched Voyager's wonderful "Future's End, Part One" with my friends, then this week's Succession (currently Team Shiv but that could change) because we could already see that the World Series score was atrocious. That didn't improve, but I don't care about the Braves winning now that I know Youngkin won the Virginia governor's race, which is infinitely worse. We may be getting the fall's first frost tonight, so here is some of the color last weekend at Brookside Gardens: 

2021-10-31 15.42.10

2021-10-31 14.59.58A

2021-10-31 15.06.16

2021-10-31 15.12.02

2021-10-31 15.33.26A

2021-10-31 15.37.59

2021-10-31 15.48.11

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