Poem for Wednesday and Christmas at Hillwood

Brief Interval
By Cheryl Clarke

I knew what I was about
stroking your lovely
neck in the perilously
brief
interval at the intersection of
desire, the real, and feminist
derring-do.

And if the intersection is three
or four points of variance,
divergence, diversion,
aversion, and hapless brief
interval
larger than the grid,
in dread of a walled corner,
a piano stool, a
contraband .38,
and that flip of an
eye eros,
oh, throat

I don’t do well with
expectation. Come up
here if it’s too cool a
story below with your
windows cracked.
Higher is warmer
in this last,
fast
phantasmic
interval.

-------- 

Tuesday was a lot like Monday, involving laundry, moving CDs out of plastic cases into binders, and a walk at Cabin John Park in the late afternoon. Katniss has decided that she likes spending her afternoons in the built-in cat bed in the big cat tree we got off freecycle, and Effie usually spends a few winter daytime hours sleeping on a throw blanket on our bed. 

My Voyager group watched "Nothing Human" which I had barely remembered, and I find the title ironic because while the Doctor was sanctimoniously renouncing Cardassian medical breakthroughs obtained by sacrificing Bajorans, he didn't also renounce the vast amounts of human medicine developed by deliberately infecting the poor, especially people of color. 

Afterward, Paul and I watched the final episodes of The Witcher: Blood Origin. This show has a cast I like what seems like a more coherent storyline than The Witcher, but it felt so much like a Rings of Power/Game of Thrones crossover ripoff that I kept forgetting what I was watching. Before it's too far into January, Hillwood's Christmas decorations: