Poem for Tuesday and Chihuly Under Light

To Mars from Arizona 

By Alberto Ríos 

Saturday mornings were science fiction—

That is, on that day anything was possible.

We didn’t have to go to the movies for that,

Though when we did, we were introduced to ourselves

More than anything. Ourselves in rockets,

Ourselves taking chances, ourselves speaking to the universe.

Outside of the movies, we were still in them—

Our bikes were our rockets, our submarines, our jets.

But mostly, and first, our bikes were our horses 

In this childhood West, a loyal, red Western Flyer

Taking me everywhere, up and down, fast and slow.

Only later did I understand it was my own legs

That did it all. My own legs and my arms to steer,

My own small, mighty lungs to shout—

A shout that would later become a song.

When they weren’t horses, when my legs were tired,

When the shouts calmed down into just talking,

We bike-riders would sit, and find in that talking 

The gold we had been looking for, though we didn’t know it.

The gold was made of plans for Saturdays still to come—

We each had different ideas, but we all had them,

Speaking them confidently as if we were lions,

Deep-voiced and sure even in that quietude.

What would happen next was far away,

But even as we rested, something in us knew

We would catch the future no matter how fast it ran.

-------- 

Tuesday was a big catch-up day -- laundry, dishwasher, sweeping up after cats, and moving the last several hundred photos of 2023 into folders and backups so I could start the 2024 folders. We went out at lunchtime to pick up bagels (they have "invisible bagels" in the empty bins at Blazing Bagels) and took a walk in the afternoon to the beach, where the eagles were hanging out in the tallest tree and the commotion of coots was in the water. 

Only three of us made it from my Voyager group, so we chatted instead of watching anything. After dinner, we watched this week's Percy Jackson, which gets more interesting every week, then we started watching The Morning Show, whose first couple of episodes are mind-blowingly good and I can't believe it took me this long to see them. This weekend at Chihuly Garden and Glass, I learned how different the macchia look if you shine a flashlight on them: