Poem for Thursday and Farm at the Fair

Eurydice 

By Margaret Atwood 

He is here, come down to look for you.

It is the song that calls you back,

a song of joy and suffering

equally: a promise:

that things will be different up there

than they were last time.

 

You would rather have gone on feeling nothing,

emptiness and silence; the stagnant peace

of the deepest sea, which is easier

than the noise and flesh of the surface.

 

You are used to these blanched dim corridors,

you are used to the king

who passes you without speaking.

 

The other one is different

and you almost remember him.

He says he is singing to you

because he loves you,

 

not as you are now,

so chilled and minimal: moving and still

both, like a white curtain blowing

in the draft from a half-opened window

beside a chair on which nobody sits.

 

He wants you to be what he calls real.

He wants you to stop light.

He wants to feel himself thickening

like a treetrunk or a haunch

and see blood on his eyelids

when he closes them, and the sun beating.

 

This love of his is not something

he can do if you aren’t there,

but what you knew suddenly as you left your body

cooling and whitening on the lawn

 

was that you love him anywhere,

even in this land of no memory,

even in this domain of hunger.

You hold love in your hand, a red seed

you had forgotten you were holding.

 

He has come almost too far.

He cannot believe without seeing,

and it’s dark here.

Go back, you whisper,

 

but he wants to be fed again

by you. O handful of gauze, little

bandage, handful of cold

air, it is not through him

you will get your freedom.

-------- 

It was unseasonably warm on Thursday, 95 degrees and humid, so for obvious reasons we stayed indoors. I did some computer work in the morning, did some reading over lunch, and watched some of the early Mariners game, but it was so hot out that we decided to walk around Bellevue Crossroads Mall instead of outdoors, then stop at QFC since we were there for some produce and snacks. 

My Thursday chat group spared me having to watch the Ravens game against Kansas City, after which Cheryl, Paul, and I watched the new episode of The Rings of Power, which I am happy to have back. Now we're watching Kaos, where Janet McTeer is stealing all her scenes and David Thewlis is a blast. Animals we saw at the Washington State Fair with our neighbors last weekend: