Wednesday, August 21, 2024

Poem for Tuesday and Renaissance Falconry

Send Forth the High Falcon 
By Léonie Adams 

Send forth the high falcon flying after the mind   
Till it come toppling down from its cold cloud:   
The beak of the falcon to pierce it till it fall
Where the simple heart is bowed.
O in wild innocence it rides
The rare ungovernable element,
But once it sways to terror and descent,
The marches of the wind are its abyss,
No wind staying it upward of the breast—
Let mind be proud for this,
And ignorant from what fabulous cause it dropt,
Or with how learned a gesture the unschooled heart   
Shall lull both terror and innocence to rest.

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My doctor got my medical order to the lab yesterday, so on Tuesday morning I went in, fasting, to get my blood drawn (the good news is that the lab is very fast, so I have the results already, and they look good to me though I'm not a doctor, and she'll also have them by my physical on Thursday). It was otherwise an uneventful day, cool and rainy at times -- so much so that one of the nocturnal water mammals (not sure if muskrat or nutria) was out during the day hanging out by the boats. I finished the scanning part of my scanning and editing project, which was satisfying, though the laundry isn't folded.

My Voyager group was missing several people so we didn't watch an episode, but Meredith and I got to talk to Deborah for an hour on Zoom instead, and that was awesome. Plus the Orioles won and the Yankees lost, though it was a near thing in both cases and extra innings in the case of the latter. Now we're watching Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, which I guess is fine, but these new movies feel like reactionary nice-mom-and-daughter answers to the 2016 feminist movie that the internet hated and I loved. Some of the birds and falconry we saw at the Washington Midsummer Renaissance Faire:

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