By Amy King
Shame on you for dating a museum:
Everything is dead there and nothing is alive.
Not everyone who lives to be old embraces
the publicity of it all. I mean, you get up and folks
want to know, How did you get here? What makes you
go? What is the secret? And there is no secret except
there are many things that build the years out.
They are not vegetables every day and working out
but a faith that all of these things add up
and lead us to some sum total happiness
we can cash in for forever love in the face
of never lasting. That people along the way
keep disappearing in a variety show of deathbed ways
is also the sheer terror that it may not hold for us too.
That we may outlast everything and be left
alone to keep going, never Icarus with wax melting,
never the one whose smoke & drink undid
the lungs that pull our wings in then out and the liver
that keeps chugging the heft of Elizabeth Cotten’s
“Freight Train” with her upside down left hand guitar still
playing in videos past her presence. I have become a person since
I reorganized my face in the mirror and the world is my inflation.
But this testament offers no sound or silence since
nothing is proven yet and you are still here,
the dead stars’ light landing on your rods and cones
in a vitrine of cameos building—blink.
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I had an ordinary chore-filled Thursday morning during which the overnight rain continued. Then the rain stopped and the wind blew in sunny weather, but it also blew down a tree branch on top of a transformer, taking it and a bunch of wires down. So the power in all the lakeside neighborhoods between Marymoor and Idylwood Parks went off, and stayed off. Since we couldn't use our computers, we went out to do some shopping, then we took a walk to the park in the glorious post-storm weather.
Our power came back in the late afternoon, so we watched the Quantum Leap we missed during the World Series, then I chatted with most of my Thursday night regulars. Afterward, we watched Loki, which finally gave us a full episode actually about Loki for a change and let most of the rest of the cast have some of the kind of fun we got first season. We ate dinner in front of the TV. Bellevue Botanical Garden was setting up its holiday light display when we visited last weekend:
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