Poem for Friday and Venus Is Missing

A Hymn To Venus 

By Sappho 

Translated by Roby Datta 

O thou on broider'd throne, immortal Venus,

Daughter of Jove, wile-weaver, I beseech thee,

Not, not with pains, and not with troubles, weigh thou,

O Queen, my spirit;

But hither come, if ever thou aforetime

That voice of mine with heedful ear from far-off

Didst hear, and, having left thy Father's mansions

All-golden, camest

With chariot yoked; and thou wast drawn by beauteous

And fleeting sparrows, round the earth all-dusky

A-flapping fast their wings, from utmost heaven

Athwart the midmost;

And quickly they arrived; and thou, O blest one,

Thy smile displaying on thy face immortal,

Didst ask, why now again I grieved, and wherefore

Again I call'd thee,

And what I most desired, for me to happen,

With madding spirit. "Now again, what Charmer

Wouldst thou lead forth to be thy love? What person,

O Sappho, wrongs thee?

"For, even tho' one flies, one soon shall follow,

And, if one takes not gifts, one yet shall give them,

And, if one loves thee not, one soon shall love thee,

Howso unwilling."

Come now to me, and loosen me from cruel

Tangle of care, and, whatso to accomplish

My spirit seeks, accomplish; and thyself be

A fellow-fighter.

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Adam and Haley closed on their new house on Friday! They're moving closer to her parents, since she's teaching classes in Fitchburg and Worcester but not in Boston, and he works remotely so he's fine with moving. My day was not as exciting as theirs -- it involved eggs for lunch, a bunch of phone calls trying to find a new doctor, and various computer stuff, but it didn't rain and the beach had ducks and some cormorants. 

When we got home, we watched the Peach Bowl; I like both Oregon and Indiana, but the latter won easily. Now we're watching the last episode of The Winter King, where a lot of the violence seems to be for violence's sake and not history or storytelling, but I never read the books it's based on so maybe this is Cornwell's fault and not the show's. Here are photos of Venus Is Missing, a one-woman tour de force at the Seattle Art Museum:

Poem for Thursday and Electric Blooms

On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs 

By Renee Nicole Macklin 

i want back my rocking chairs,

solipsist sunsets,

& coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches.

i've donated bibles to thrift stores

(mashed them in plastic trash bags with an acidic himalayan salt lamp—

the post-baptism bibles, the ones plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of zealots, the dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind):

remember more the slick rubber smell of high gloss biology textbook pictures; they burned the hairs inside my nostrils,

& salt & ink that rubbed off on my palms.

under clippings of the moon at two forty five AM I study&repeat

               ribosome

               endoplasmic—

               lactic acid

               stamen

at the IHOP on the corner of powers and stetson hills --

i repeated & scribbled until it picked its way & stagnated somewhere i can't point to anymore, maybe my gut --

maybe there in-between my pancreas & large intestine is the piddly brook of my soul.

it's the ruler by which i reduce all things now; hard-edged & splintering from knowledge that used to sit, a cloth against fevered forehead.

can i let them both be? this fickle faith and this college science that heckles from the back of the classroom

now i can't believe—

               that the bible and qur'an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom used to & exhaling from their mouths "make room for wonder" --

all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest & is summarized as:

life is merely

to ovum and sperm

and where those two meet

and how often and how well

and what dies there.

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This award-winning student poem was written by Renee Nicole Macklin, later Renee Nicole Good, murdered this week by ICE. Here is the fundraiser to support her wife and son. 

I was up half the night with an upset stomach, so I slept late on Thursday and kind of dragged all morning reading, then showering. It didn't help that it stayed deeply overcast and dark all day. I did some cleaning after lunch and eventually we walked in the gloom to the park, which today had more ravens than ducks on the beach. 

We watched the Fiesta Bowl, which was an exciting game and I'm delighted that Miami won! I had my usual Thursday chat, and now we're watching more of The Winter King, still extremely violent and bloody and the same Merlin who supports baby murder in the name of the gods opposes abortion. Flowers at Bellevue Botanical Garden d'Lights:

Poem for Wednesday and Chihuly Sun

Glass 

By Robert Francis 

Words of a poem should be glass

But glass so simple-subtle its shape

Is nothing but the shape of what it holds.

A glass spun for itself is empty,

Brittle, at best Venetian trinket.

Embossed glass hides the poem of its absence.

Words should be looked through, should be windows.

The best word were invisible.

The poem is the thing the poet thinks.

If the impossible were not,

And if the glass, only the glass,

Could be removed, the poem would remain.

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I did lots of chatting on Wednesday -- with my high school friends in the morning, the first time in several weeks we all made it onto the call, and with Kristen in the afternoon around watching Turning Red, since we're waiting for Laurie to watch anything longer or more complicated. In between I did some sorting of clothing for a start-of-year donation to Goodwill and a bunch of reconciling checkbook stuff from the end of last year, plus a walk to the lake.

The Masked Singer is back, which I am ridiculously happy about (and happy they started the season with Rita Ora singing "Golden" from KPop Demon Hunters; I think I'm rooting for Scarab to win it all). Since we only have MGM+ for a few days, we're watching The Winter King, the violent rape-filled Arthurian retelling based on Bernard Cornwell novels, and I admit I like the less "realistic" Robin Hood Saxons much better. The huge Yellow Sun piece at Chihuly Garden and Glass: 

Greetings from Maryland

Hello from Washingtonian Lake, where we're staying for the next week while visiting family and friends for Thanksgiving. Our flight took off late, but it was an easy trip once we got off the ground; we ate cashew butter and jam sandwiches with cheese and I read a third of Alix Harrow's The Everlasting, which I've had on hold in the King County Library system since it came out but finally broke down and bought so I could start it on this flight. In some ways it's a riff and an expansion of her "The Six Deaths of the Saint" -- they're both about how national mythology and imperial power are created regardless of the costs -- but the new book is also a meditation on how literature itself manufactures heroes, warps history, and builds worlds as propaganda, particularly English literature from Malory to Spenser to Tolkien, so it both refers to and pokes at disturbing aspects of books I love.

By the time we got our luggage, picked up our rental car, and went from Virginia to Maryland, it was after 8 pm, so we stopped at the Target near our hotel and grabbed some food for dinner, which we ate while watching Monday Night Football. Now we're watching the new episode of Watson and my next door neighbors, who are in our apartment taking care of our cats, just sent photos of kitties wrassling. A few photos from airport to airport:

Greetings from Camelot

I spent a lovely Saturday afternoon in Snohomish with Paul and Chris -- we went to First and Union Kitchen for brunch (I had eggs and skillet potatoes with their excellent sourdough toast), then took a walk, first by the storefronts decorated for the holidays (will post pics of them soon, explanation for the delay below), then along the river, around Pilchuck Park, and up past the co-op back to Chris's, where we hung out chatting for a while. 

But now I'm distracted because we're watching Excalibur for the first time in we can't remember how many years, and while it doesn't quite hold up for me after The Mists of Avalon, Merlin, and Spear, it's still an enjoyable take on the legend (Nigel Terry! Patrick Stewart! Helen Mirren! Liam Neeson! Ciaran Hinds! Gabriel Byrne!). Also, it was filmed at Cahir Castle, and I remembered that I never posted any photos from visiting Cahir in Ireland last fall!

Poem for Monday and George VI's Tea

Tea 

By Carol Ann Duffy 

I like pouring your tea, lifting

the heavy pot, and tipping it up,

so the fragrant liquid streams in your china cup.

Or when you’re away, or at work,

I like to think of your cupped hands as you sip,

as you sip, of the faint half-smile of your lips.

I like the questions – sugar? – milk? –

and the answers I don’t know by heart, yet,

for I see your soul in your eyes, and I forget.

Jasmine, Gunpowder, Assam, Earl Grey, Ceylon,

I love tea’s names. Which tea would you like? I say

but it’s any tea for you, please, any time of day,

as the women harvest the slopes

for the sweetest leaves, on Mount Wu-Yi,

and I am your lover, smitten, straining your tea. 

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I still haven't put away all the laundry from last week but I had to do more laundry on Monday, plus a bunch of other uninteresting chores and making a few appointments. We had spectacular weather, high 60s-low 70s, so around lunch I did a lot of reading in the breeze (currently Nicola Griffith's Spear, very belatedly, and it is excellent), then we walked to the beach and watched a murder of crows rip open and steal a swimmer's bag of Doritos. 

Cheryl and I watched a few episodes of The Mandalorian (Bo-Katan Kryze for President, unless Lord Buckethead and the Monster Raving Loony Party are still a thing in Britain and we can trade for the Republicans). These photos may look like hotel china but this is actually a King's Speech nerd fangirl post, because the first few are the china made for and used by George VI when he visited the Empress and the rest are replicas used now for high tea:

Greetings from Watching the Olympics

I spent Friday morning finishing a project I last worked on a year ago, namely arranging my bookshelves, which till now have had large sections of "tall books here" and "books that stick out here" but now has all the nautical history together, the Arthurian legends and stories together, and the Pre-Raphaelite art volumes spread out over only two bookcases because some of them are very tall. I had to debate whether Holy Blood, Holy Grail belonged with the Arthurian stories and then whether Dan Brown belonged with that since he stole the plot of The Da Vinci Code from it, but thus go the compromises of no longer having a big basement library. 

Otherwise, I watched a lot of Olympic reruns, since the west coast is not a great time zone to watch live events from Paris. We're caught up on rhythmic gymnastics and artistic swimming, plus some table tennis and the only few seconds of beach volleyball I managed not to avoid. We took a walk, we ate leftover Indian food for dinner, then we watched Wicked Little Letters because I needed a break from sports! (It was, at least, a good night for the Orioles and Mariners both.) Here are Equestrian Chaos, three women who demonstrated incredible riding and archery skills at the Washington Renaissance Faire (and who have a horse named Loki):

Poem for Wednesday and Blue Angels

Flight 

By Idrissa Simmonds 

I call to ask my mother the name of the street where we bought the suitcases when we left

Brooklyn. A better question would have been how did it feel to be sliced from the rib of Pine and

Loring and sent, like a kite, up North. Or tell me what your mother said to you in her grand rear

room the night we left, seated on the edge of her bed in her nightgown, muted in the low light.

So many bellies in the house. Cacophony of kreyol and Brooklyn buk and sweet sweat across the

walls. Did she tell you to follow your husband. Did she tell you anything about us. How, above

all, you should keep us anchored to here, where the distance between comfort and safety is

measurable by the length of the hallway, the distance from one room to the next. The rooms, like

capsules, each with its own medicine for Black kids. Or, tell me what you wore on the plane

ride. I only remember what I wore: stockings and Mary Janes and the pink knit pleated skirt. I did

not remember this was your first time flying, a grown woman over thirty, and you had never seen

how small the world looked beneath your feet.

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Adam has officially moved to Ohio, though most of his things won't arrive for a week or so. We got up early to drive him to SeaTac on Wednesday morning, then came home to do some work and the laundry that had been postponed several days. I had a cat on my arm so I was late getting on my usual Wednesday chat, but everyone was there this week -- even everyone's pets were there this week, demanding attention! 

We watched more climbing, synchronized swimming, then the delightful Orioles game around an afternoon walk, though the Mariners game did not end well. I finished The Bright Sword, which I enjoyed a lot -- it's not genre-exploding for me like The Mists of Avalon was, but it has interesting takes on many characters and a nice mix of traditions. Now we're watching Time Bandits. The Blue Angels last weekend: