Greetings from Zoo Lights

Poetry posts may be erratic until I move. I spent most of Monday packing -- first little collectibles that came in their own padded boxes, which we'd had saved in our storage unit and retrieved on Saturday, then games and oversized books, which have to be fit like jigsaw pieces so they don't slide around in medium boxes. We're letting the moving company pack the breakables so they're all covered in case of disaster, but I can manage the books and boxes. Anyone know how to keep built Lego sets intact in transit? 

We walked to the park in the late afternoon and were surprised to see prunus blossoms already -- hot pink ones! -- along with many ducks. Then we came home, ate leftover Indian food for dinner, and watched a few episodes of History of the World Part II, which is pretty ridiculous rather than clever satire but that suits my mood at the moment. Now we're watching F1, which is...fine? There are cars and men who drive them, don't ask me more. Wild Lanterns at the zoo, glowing at night and over for the season in daylight: 

Greetings from Juanita Beach

Quickie watching Lower Decks after a day of mixed chores and fun. We stopped at a U-Haul store to pick up packing paper, then since we were in Kirkland we went to Juanita Beach and Juanita Bay to see the trumpeter swans who winter there. (We also saw lots of wood ducks, mallards, mergansers, buffleheads, widgeons, and a couple of herons and eagles.)

 

We stopped at Safeway on the way home, saw a spectacular sunset, ate Beyond Burgers for dinner, and watched Robin Hood: Men In Tights because we realized during the Mel Brooks documentary the other night that we hadn't seen it in decades and figured it was revisiting (it's better than its reviews). Now we're seeing animated DS9.

Poem for Friday and Sharks and Rays

Painting a Room 

By Katia Kapovich 

Here on a March day in ‘89

I blanch the ceiling and walls with bluish lime.

Drop cloths and old newspapers hide

the hardwood floors. All my furniture has been sold,

or given away to bohemian friends.

There is nothing to eat but bread and wine.

An immigration visa in my pocket, I paint

the small apartment where I’ve lived for ten years.

Taking a break around 4 p.m.,

I sit on the last chair in the empty kitchen,

smoke a cigarette and wipe my tears

with the sleeve of my old pullover.

I am free from regrets but not from pain.

Ten years of fears, unrequited loves, odd jobs,

of night phone calls. Now they’ve disconnected the line.

I drop the ashes in the sink, pour turpentine

into a jar, stirring with a spatula. My heart throbs

in my right palm when I pick up the brush again.

For ten years the window’s turquoise square

has held my eyes in its simple frame.

Now, face to face with the darkening sky,

what more can I say to the glass but thanks

for being transparent, seamless, wide

and stretching perspective across the size

of the visible.

Then I wash the brushes and turn off the light.

This is my last night before moving abroad.

I lie down on the floor, a rolled-up coat

under my head. This is the last night.

Freedom smells of a freshly painted room,

of wooden floors swept with a willow broom,

and of stale raisin bread.

-------- 

We told everyone on social media today that we're moving to Worcester, Massachusetts next month, which we didn't want to do until we were sure everything would happen on schedule -- younger son and his wife closing on their new house since we're buying their old one, moving company signed, boxes obtained, work transfer approved, lease bought out. So of course tonight, after a day of packing (and after hours on a Friday), our Wells Fargo banker wrote to warn us that they haven't been able to resolve some assessment fee that's charged to everyone in the neighborhood, and it's in no way clear to me how a HOA fee under $100 that was always scheduled through 2027 is such a problem. 

Besides the packing and lots of necessary emails, we walked to the beach in weather so nice that I don't want to brag about it because everyone I know on the east coast north of South Carolina is about to get slammed with snow. We caught up with my parents on Google Meet, ate leftover food from Cactus for dinner while watching Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man with Cheryl, and now we're watching more Lower Decks ("I, Excretus" with its "Naked Time" and "Spectre of the Gun" references is hilarious; this show definitely improves as it goes along). Here are some photos from last weekend of sharks and rays at the Seattle Aquarium, whose facade is reflected in the guitarfish photo:

Greetings from Potomac

We woke up Sunday to the horrible news and the predicted snow -- not much, less than an inch, but with temperatures in the 20s and wind chill in the single digits, it was quite cold and stuck around on walks and grass, as we discovered on an after breakfast walk around Washingtonian Lake. Then we met up with Adam and Haley (he'd been running with a friend), with whom we ordered Lebanese Taverna for lunch and ate it in the hotel's breakfast area; unsurprisingly, Pepper likes lebneh as much as I do. 

In the afternoon we headed over to my parents' house along with Daniel and Cahaya (who had been out shopping), where we ate lots of hors d'oeuvres while watching (no judging!) Blazing Saddles because both sons had discovered their wives had never seen it, plus some football. Then we had latkes and various other Chanukah foods after lighting the menorah and exchanged some presents. Now we're just back from visiting Seneca Creek State Park's Winter Lights, which we hadn't seen in several years!

Greetings from the National Zoo

Cheryl is here and we're watching The King's Speech because it's September 3, the date of the titular speech in the movie. I spent the afternoon at the National Zoo, where we went to see some of the baby animals born there this summer and to see Washed Ashore: Art to Save the Sea, in which artists created sea sculptures made of plastic and styrofoam garbage. Then we came home for dinner while Maddy worked, Cheryl arrived, and we watched Blazing Saddles as part of our Gene Wilder memorial film festival. More after the Renaissance faires this weekend!

Poem for Thursday, Young Frankenstein, Salisbury Zoo

Letter Already Broadcast into Space
By Jake Adam York

                        —To Sun Ra, from Earth

You are not here,

you are not here
in Birmingham,
        where they keep your name,

not in Elmwood's famous plots
                or the monuments
of bronze or steel or the strew

        of change in the fountain
where the firehoses sprayed.

                In the furnaces,
in the interchange sprawl
        that covers Tuxedo Junction,

in the shopping malls, I think,
                they've forgotten you,

the broadcast towers, the barbecues,

        the statue of the Roman god,
spiculum blotting out
                part of the stars.

To get it dark enough,
        I have to fold back
into the hills, into the trees

                where my parents
planted me, where the TV
        barely reaches and I drift

with my hand on the dial
                of my father's radio,

spinning, too, the tall antenna
        he raised above the pines.

I have to stand at the base

                of the galvanized
pole I can use as an azimuth
        and plot you in.

The hunter's belt is slung again,
                and you are there

in the pulse, in the light of
        Alnitak, Alnilam, Mintaka,

all your different names,

                you are there
in all the rearrangements
        of the stars.

                        Come down now,
come down again,

                like the late fall light
into the mounds along the creek,

        light that soaks like a flood
to show the Cherokee sitting upright
                underground, light

like the fire they imply.

        Come down now
into the crease the freight train
                hits like a piano's hammer

and make the granite hum
        beneath.

                        Come down now

as my hand slips from the dial,
                tired again of looking
for the sound of another way

        to say everything.

Come down now with your diction
                and your dictionary.

Come down, Uncle, come down
        and help me rise.

I have forgot my wings.

--------

Wednesday was another work and chore day. I watched this week's Voyager episode, the odious "Day of Honor" (yes, I know Paris/Torres fans love it, but frankly it encapsulates everything I don't like about their relationship and it's also horribly written). Paul and I got haircuts while Maddy was shopping, then we all went to Giant and CVS.

Paul, Cheryl, and I continued our Gene Wilder marathon with Young Frankenstein, which I hadn't seen in years -- it's not my favorite Mel Brooks movie but it's probably my favorite Wilder performance in one and one of my favorite Teri Garr roles, too. From the Salisbury Zoo, some animals we saw when we stopped for lunch on the way home from the beach:

Poem for Tuesday, Imperium, Genius, Lewis Ginter Butterflies

To the Garden the World
By Walt Whitman

To the garden, the world, anew ascending,
Potent mates, daughters, sons, preluding,
The love, the life of their bodies, meaning and being,
Curious, here behold my resurrection, after slumber;
The revolving cycles, in their wide sweep, have brought me again,
Amorous, mature—all beautiful to me—all wondrous;
My limbs, and the quivering fire that ever plays through them, for reasons, most wondrous;
Existing, I peer and penetrate still,
Content with the present—content with the past,
By my side, or back of me, Eve following,
Or in front, and I following her just the same.

--------

I got to spend Monday with Cheryl watching movies and seeing animals! We started by getting Indian food while dropping Madeline off at the mall to shop for work clothes, then we went to Imperium, which I really didn't think I'd like -- it has Daniel Radcliffe in a role in which he's gotten pretty good reviews, but it's about white supremacists and I was afraid it would be a lot more violent and vile than it was (I mean, it was vile, but it was mostly white supremacists spouting conspiracy theory garbage, not physically attacking the specific Jews and people of color who are the targets of their venom). Radcliffe and Toni Collette are both very good in it and it's an interesting cautionary tale.

After that, we retrieved niece, then watched Genius on demand with Paul. This one is about editor Max Perkins's relationship with Thomas Wolfe and to a lesser extent F. Scott Fitzgerald, and stars Colin Firth, Jude Law, and Guy Pearce plus Nicole Kidman, Laura Linney, and a generally fantastic cast. (I mean, you knew I wasn't going to miss a movie with Bertie and David from The King's Speech anyway.) There's a lot of vague talk about what makes literature great (apparently men telling stories about their fathers) and the female roles veer from barely tolerable to utterly cringe-worthy, but it has wonderful performances and passionate bromance.

We learned that Gene Wilder had died while we were watching Genius and were going to watch one of his movies, but we got so distracted talking about which of his Mel Brooks movies was our favorite that we ended up watching High Anxiety because none of us had seen it in many years and it remains utterly hilarious, even without Wilder. We'll watch Willy Wonka and Young Frankenstein later in the week. Cheryl and I took a walk, saw a pair of bunnies and rescued a cicada before she went home. Meanwhile, Madeline went to work, Paul and I had vegetarian jambalaya for dinner, and the Nationals beat the Phillies. Some of Lewis Ginter's butterflies (live and Lego) on Sunday:

Greetings from San Andreas

If I had a fangirl day on Tuesday and a nature sightseeing day on Wednesday, then Thursday was a combination. We went first to the Japanese Garden at the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant, which is a wildlife preserve and with beautiful flowers and a teahouse that is also home to the building best known on film as Starfleet Academy, all of which are stunning (this time we even toured the water filtration facilities, which are really interesting after having seen the Paris sewers). Then we drove to Palmdale to see the visible part of the San Andreas Fault nearest where we're staying outside Los Angeles, where we walked through desert brush with lizards to see the schisms in the rock formation.

From there we drove to Vasquez Rocks, which has featured in many, many movies and TV shows (most notably among my friends as the place where Kirk fought the Gorn, though it's also, for instance, where Hedley Lamarr rounded up his posse in Blazing Saddles and where Colin Firth and Matthew Goode canoodled in A Single Man's flashback scene). Only Adam climbed all the way up the rocks (and found a snake); the rest of us found lizards and flowers in the crevices, and we all ate lunch and visited the nature center. We also went to Garden of the Gods, a park that was once part of the Iverson Movie Ranch where many Westerns were filmed, where we saw people bouldering and more lizards.

After a stop at a Target because Daniel needed a dress shirt for Saturday and the rest of us wanted cold drinks, we went to Paul's brother David's new house to meet Maria, the woman he's going to marry this weekend, and see his kids, her kids, his and Paul's brother Jon, and their many pets. All three brothers and their parents were there, and we took Maddy shopping for wedding necessities for a bit while the bride and groom were picking up their rings. They brought in pizza and we played with their three dogs in their beautiful backyard. Here are mostly family photos; I'll get to the nature pictures in a few days!