Poem for Friday and More Cherry Blossoms

The Leash
By Ada Limón

After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear,
the frantic automatic weapons unleashed,
the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands,
that brute sky opening in a slate metal maw
that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what's
left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned
orange and acidic by a coal mine. How can
you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek
bottom dry to suck the deadly water up into
your own lungs, like venom? Reader, I want to
say, Don't die. Even when silvery fish after fish
comes back belly up, and the country plummets
into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn't there still
something singing? The truth is: I don't know.
But sometimes, I swear I hear it, the wound closing
like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move
my living limbs into the world without too much
pain, can still marvel at how the dog runs straight
toward the pickup trucks break-necking down
the road, because she thinks she loves them,
because she’s sure, without a doubt, that the loud
roaring things will love her back, her soft small self
alive with desire to share her goddamn enthusiasm,
until I yank the leash back to save her because
I want her to survive forever. Don't die, I say,
and we decide to walk for a bit longer, starlings
high and fevered above us, winter coming to lay
her cold corpse down upon this little plot of earth.
Perhaps, we are always hurtling our body towards
the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love
from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe
like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together
peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.

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I had plans on Thursday to meet my friend Mary, who is in the area visiting her mother, at Glenstone so she could see Split-Rocker, but the weather conspired against us -- first we had a thunderstorm warning, then we had a tornado warning, and we wound up deciding it was probably foolish to drive out in the open countryside and walk half a mile to look at sculpture in the driving rain. Instead I did some more scanning (and rereading) of chapters from books on Ezra Pound, Sylvia Beach, Harriet Shaw Weaver, and other editors of the 1920s, plus a bunch about Gurdjieff and the Rope. 

 I had my usual Thursday night chat group, and around it I watched the last two episodes of Our Flag Means Death, which is so glorious in so many ways except that HBO has not yet committed to a second season, which needs to be remedied immediately (if Rhys and Taika are too busy for a full series, I'd settle for a two hour movie that reunites everyone and ties the knot for the lovers, that is, loose ends. I'm already rewatching the whole thing. Meanwhile here are some more photos of DC's cherry blossoms, which are probably blowing across the Tidal Basin and away as I type: