Poem for Wednesday and Enchanted Fairy Forest

Map
By Linda Hogan

This is the world
so vast and lonely
without end, with mountains
named for men
who brought hunger
from other lands,
and fear
of the thick, dark forest of trees
that held each other up,
knowing fire dreamed of swallowing them
and spoke an older tongue,
and the tongue of the nation of wolves
was the wind around them.
Even ice was not silent.
It cried its broken self
back to warmth.
But they called it
ice, wolf, forest of sticks,
as if words would make it something
they could hold in gloved hands,
open, plot a way
and follow.

This is the map of the forsaken world.
This is the world without end
where forests have been cut away from their trees.
These are the lines wolf could not pass over.
This is what I know from science:
that a grain of dust dwells at the center
of every flake of snow,
that ice can have its way with land,
that wolves live inside a circle
of their own beginning.
This is what I know from blood:
the first language is not our own.

There are names each thing has for itself,
and beneath us the other order already moves.
It is burning.
It is dreaming.
It is waking up.

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Tuesday was a chore day, though it was relaxing. We did some work to look into home improvements (our carpet is a thousand years old, one of the upstairs bathrooms has a crack in the ceiling) and I did a bunch of laundry after our weekend of swimming and sweating, plus I got a new hanging jewelry organizer so I did some organizing. It felt like a sauna outside even when there was no sun -- a few minutes of hard rain but it was mostly drizzle -- and not fun to walk in though the bunnies were out. 

We ate the rest of our anniversary Ethiopian food for dinner, then my Voyager group (minus our birthday girl ) watched "Random Thoughts" -- which is, well, terrible. After that, we watched a couple of episodes of The Terminal List, which is moderately interesting when the conspiracy within the Department of Defense is at the forefront but a lot of it is just grisly revenge drama and I don't like watching that at all. From Clark's Elioak Farm, the damp fairy houses in the woods after the storm: