Poem for Saturday and Afternoon in Wheaton

Welcome Rain on a Spring Night

By Du Fu
Translated by Burton Watson

The good rain knows its season,
When spring arrives, it brings life.
It follows the wind secretly into the night,
And moistens all things softly, without sound.
On the country road, the clouds are all black,
On a riverboat, a single fire bright.
At dawn one sees this place now red and wet,
The flowers are heavy in the brocade city.

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I started Friday with more packing, then after lunch we went to see about getting our minivan radio replaced with one with Android Auto, a rear view camera, and all the bells and whistles we've never had before. We thought we were just going to talk about options, but it turned out they could install the one we wanted that day, so we left the van and went to walk around Wheaton Triangle and Wheaton Mall, where we got Cinnabon and visited stores I haven't seen in ages, which was a lot of fun. 

 

The last picture is from dinner and dessert from The Cheesecake Factory (Beyond Burger for me, chicken and biscuits for the birthday boy) with my parents for Paul's birthday. We got on Google Meet with the kids from my parents' house, then came home and watched some basketball as the Number Ones fell, followed by a bunch of episodes of Daisy Jones and the Six, which I'm enjoying enormously, both musically and in terms of the characters. I'm sad there are only a few more episodes.

Poem for Friday and Glenstone Deer

Psalm
By George Oppen

   Veritas sequitur...

In the small beauty of the forest
The wild deer bedding down—
That they are there!

                              Their eyes
Effortless, the soft lips
Nuzzle and the alien small teeth
Tear at the grass

                              The roots of it
Dangle from their mouths
Scattering earth in the strange woods.
They who are there.

                              Their paths
Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them
Hang in the distances
Of sun

                              The small nouns
Crying faith
In this in which the wild deer   
Startle, and stare out.

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On Thursday I was less boring than on Wednesday because we went out to open new bank accounts, stopped in the Corner Bakery for cold drinks since it was a gorgeous nearly-75-degree day, and took a walk in the winter aconite-covered park. Otherwise, there was more jewelry packing and charm repair. 

Kristen and I watched the end of Age of Ultron after dinner -- Ethiopian from Sheba, yay -- after which I talked to the 2/5 of my Thursday night chat group who could come this week. Then Paul and I watched Florida Atlantic upset Tennessee in the NCAA tournament. Deer in the woods at Glenstone last weekend: 

Poem for Thursday and Locust Grove Quails

Quail's Nest
By John Clare

I wandered out one rainy day
And heard a bird with merry joys
Cry 'wet my foot' for half the way;
I stood and wondered at the noise,

When from my foot a bird did flee--
The rain flew bouncing from her breast
I wondered what the bird could be,
And almost trampled on her nest.

The nest was full of eggs and round--
I met a shepherd in the vales,
And stood to tell him what I found.
He knew and said it was a quail's,

For he himself the nest had found,
Among the wheat and on the green,
When going on his daily round,
With eggs as many as fifteen.

Among the stranger birds they feed,
Their summer flight is short and low;
There's very few know where they breed,
And scarcely any where they go.

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I am going to be boring all week, so I will just report that Wednesday was a lot like Tuesday -- sorting and packing books in older son's room, plus organizing my jewelry and putting it in hanging organizers. I had feline supervision, so that made things more entertaining. 

Evening TV involved The Masked Singer (country night, bah, but David Archuleta I mean the Macaw was good) and The Mandalorian (yay foundlings) plus we just talked to our kids about travel plans. Spring at Locust Grove in Cabin John Park -- flowers and quail eggs! 

Poem for Wednesday and Canal Bluebells

Gradually Then Suddenly
By Philip Schaefer

Flowers a dull pink and out of stories.

The clown in the middle of town
dances but only when the streetlights

go blank. Children puff through

the window in a way that makes their faces
an inner god. I have all these chairs

I cannot use. Only the belonging

they beg for. Consider a dead oven
then consider freedom. A heavy kite

could touch Jupiter if Jupiter existed.

Any child could become a swan
song. It doesn’t take long to weather.

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Tuesday was a day of closet-emptying, children's book-sorting, and packing figurines in the original boxes I had saved at the back of the closet. Apparently I started a calculator swap in my neighborhood Buy Nothing group, since we had two TI-83s in the house. And if anyone local needs any Vera Bradley bags, please let me know. 

My Voyager group watched "Course: Oblivion" which is absolutely, utterly pointless and terrible, then Paul and I started watching Daisy Jones & the Six, which I'm enjoying enormously -- Riley Keough is wonderful and I love the music (and the Fleetwood Mac influences). Bluebells from along the canal over last weekend: 

Poem for Tuesday and Spring Turtles

A Light exists in Spring
By Emily Dickinson

A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period —
When March is scarcely here

A Color stands abroad
On Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.

It waits upon the Lawn,
It shows the furthest Tree
Upon the furthest Slope you know
It almost speaks to you.

Then as Horizons step
Or Noons report away
Without the Formula of sound
It passes and we stay —

A quality of loss
Affecting our Content
As Trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a Sacrament.

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My whole Monday was sorting ancient cosmetics and jewelry in the bottom of my bedroom armoire, and freecycling lots of random things (purses, art supplies, perfume, shoes). My mom brought us bagels, so we stopped at Giant to get cream cheese and took a walk in the park. 

Kristen and I finished Thor: The Dark World and started Age of Ultron. Evening involved watching some basketball with a break for History's Greatest Mysteries: Blackbeard's Lost Treasure and Quantum Leap. Turtles at the C&O Canal last weekend: 

Greetings from Glenstone

After a ridiculously warm January and February, we're having a rather chilly March, so I was ambivalent about having a reservation at Glenstone with expected freezing wind chill, but it was a very sunny Sunday, so after waffles and veggie sausages, we went and it wound up being a lovely afternoon. There weren't any new exhibits in the pavilion, much of which is closed right now to install an Ellsworth Kelly exhibit, but we finally managed to see the massive Richard Serra sculpture Four Rounds: Equal Weight, Unequal Measure in its custom-designed building, which was surrounded by deer in the woods. 

 

We stopped at Giant on the way home and we were planning to bring in Ethiopian food for dinner, but it turns out that Sheba is closed on Sundays, sigh. So we had spaghetti while watching the Maryland women beat Arizona in a basketball game that started out much closer than it ended, then we watched the start of the final season of Sanditon on PBS, which feels like it's dragging all the relationships out from last season though it's very pretty to look at. Now we're watching the new Marie Antoinette series, which feels like Sofia Coppola's movie is the only thing the writers used for background information. 

 

Greetings from the Canal

We had gorgeous weather on Saturday, so we ate breakfast early and went to walk on the canal. It was too chilly for frogs, but there were lots of daffodils and aconite, and to our surprise the bluebells were starting to bloom. Plus there were geese, mallards, wood ducks, and many turtles. We stopped at the Bethesda Co-op on the way home for some food, then I caught Slowpokes for Pokemon Community Day for a couple of hours. 

 

 

We had Armand's Pizza for dinner and watched the rest of this season's Shadow and Bone around the Maryland-Alabama game, in which the Terps held their own decently in the first half but couldn't keep it up in the second half (they lost by more than 20 points). Now we're watching Alina worry too much about one boy instead of all the awesome women risking their lives so she can give Kirigan and the Fold what they deserve.