Poem for Wednesday and Homestead Apples

Apple Sauce For Eve
By Marge Piercy

Those old daddies cursed you and us in you,
damned for your curiosity: for your sin
was wanting knowledge. To try, to taste,
to take into the body, into the brain
and turn each thing, each sign, each factoid
round and round as new facets glint and white
fractures into colors and the image breaks
into crystal fragments that pierce the nerves
while the brain casts the chips into patterns.

Each experiment sticks a finger deep in the pie,
dares existence, blows a horn in the ear
of belief, lets the nasty and difficult brats
of real questions into the still air
of the desiccated parlor of stasis.
What we all know to be true, constant,
melts like frost landscapes on a window
in a jet of steam. How many last words
in how many dead languages would translate into,
But what happens if I, and Whoops!

We see Adam wagging his tail, good dog, good
dog, while you and the snake shimmy up the tree,
lab partners in a dance of will and hunger,
that thirst not of the flesh but of the brain.
Men always think women are wanting sex,
cock, snake, when it is the world she's after.
Then birth trauma for the first conceived kid
of the ego, I think therefore I am, I
kick the tree, who am I, why am I,
going, going to die, die, die.

You are indeed the mother of invention,
the first scientist. Your name means
life: finite, dynamic, swimming against
the current of time, tasting, testing,
eating knowledge like any other nutrient.
We are all the children of your bright hunger.
We are all products of that first experiment,
for if death was the worm in that apple,
the seeds were freedom
and the flowering of choice.

-------- 

Flickr just ate about 100 of my newly uploaded photos so I will be brief. I unexpectedly had blood drawn this morning for routine labs -- I called to make an appointment for later in the week and they had an opening before I ate breakfast, so I was fasting -- and the rest of my day was unexciting work, selling stuff on eBay, and trying to reassure the cats that the big afternoon thunderstorm (which briefly knocked out our power, turning off my computer) that it was not a threat to them. 

My Tuesday night group watched Voyager's "Retrospect" a.k.a. the rape denial story, and it was just as infuriating as ever, my least favorite episode of Star Trek -- at least everyone I watched with agreed on that. Then Paul and I watched some more of the third season of For All Mankind around What We Do in the Shadows -- poor Guillermo, whom I feel will be fine with Nandor, and poor Will and Ellen, who I'm a lot more worried about. Homestead Farm apples: