Poem for Friday, Frogs, Baseball

Costumes Exchanging Glances
By Mary Jo Bang

            The rhinestone lights blink off and on.
Pretend stars.
I'm sick of explanations. A life is like Russell said
of electricity, not a thing but the way things behave.
A science of motion toward some flat surface,
some heat, some cold. Some light
can leave some after-image but it doesn't last.
Isn't that what they say? That and that
historical events exchange glances with nothingness.

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Thursday morning was hot and humid but not as intolerable as earlier in the week. I did a bunch of chores and a bunch of scanning, including a couple of papers from college I'd typed on my typewriter before I had a computer that I found in a folder with Shakespeare souvenirs, then I went looking for some articles I'd written years ago and instead found a box of cards and letters from Kate Mulgrew fans from my KMAS days, many of which were fantastic and will need to be on the "to be scanned" list. We took a walk in the late afternoon and ate dinner early.

We kept that schedule so we could watch the first baseball game of the season, though the thunderstorm that passed over us lingered in DC and the game ended up being delayed, then ended early. This was okay with me because I got to watch the final episode of Blindspot, which I thought was great until the half-assed ambiguous ending which always just feels like watching showy masturbation by the head writer, which the smug series creator interviews just emphasize. I'm in the mood for frogs and didn't see one on our walk, so here are some from the canal:

Poem for Friday and Fiddler Crabs

Fiddler Crab
By Loke Kok yee

Bluegrass festival
The banks of the Ohio
A fiddler crab

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Thursday was pretty uneventful apart from household chores and some writing. It was hot but nice out, we took a nice walk before dinner, with bunnies in evidence and also a neighbor's son having a hysterical meltdown because his father wouldn't let him sit in the car in the afternoon heat and pretend to drive, which was pretty amusing since I was not responsible.

We ate leftover tacos for dinner and watched what I thought was the two-hour season finale of Blindspot, only to find out that it has one more episode in a couple of weeks! At least the show isn't ending on a cliffhanger, and a character I really wanted not to be dead isn't. Here are some of the fiddler crabs we saw in the Burton Island Nature Preserve swamp:

Greetings from Winston Churchill High School

Earlier this week I got the unhappy news that Mirch Masala, the Indian restaurant in the Montgomery Mall food court with the best samosa chaat in my area, would be closing at the end of the month. So for lunch, we ordered it from GrubHub and it made me both happy to have it and sad that I won't ever have it again. In the middle of the night last night, I realized that some missing photos that were driving me nuts were in frames down the basement where we moved them when we had flooding upstairs, so I scanned those, then we took a walk in the late afternoon that we had to cut short because we had a hailstorm, followed by half a rainbow:











We had sandwiches for dinner since we'd had such a big lunch, then I spent a lot of the evening engaged in what has been a heated discussion about the name of my high school in its alumni group. Winston Churchill was indeed a racist and imperialist, though in our county we have several schools named for far less important statesmen who owned slaves and supported violent segregationist policies, so I said maybe we should consider not naming schools for people but for their neighborhoods and only got moderately trolled. I was a bit distracted while watching Burden of Truth and Blindspot (both with a lot of female characters I like).

Poem for Friday and Neighborhood Walk

Worldling
By Elizabeth Spires

In a world of souls, I set out to find them.
They who first must find each other,
be each other's fate.
There, on the open road,
I gazed into each traveler's face.
Is it you? I would ask.
Are you the ones?
No, no, they said, or nothing at all.

How many cottages did I pass,
each with a mother, a father,
a firstborn, newly swaddled, crying;
or sitting in its little chair,
dipping a fat wooden spoon
into a steaming bowl,
its mother singing it a foolish song,
One, one, a lily's my care...

Through seasons I searched,
through years I can't remember,
reading the lichens and stones
as if one were marked
with my name, my face, my form.
By night and day I searched,
never sleeping, not wanting to fail,
not wanting to simply be a star.

Finally in a town like any other town,
in a house foursquare and shining,
its door wide open to the moon,
did I find them.

There, at the top of the winding stairs,
asleep in the big bed,
the sheets thrown off, curled
like question marks into each other's arms.

Past memory, I beheld them,
naked, their bodies without flaw.
It is I, I whispered.
I, the nameless one.
And my parents, spent by the dream
of creation, slept on.

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We had a warm, sticky day on Thursday, which I got to enjoy outdoors quite a bit. Before lunch I met a neighbor for a Pokemon raid in the neighborhood, where it's fairly easy to socially distance, and we walked back toward our houses afterward discussing our kids and education and the surprise delightful Supreme Court DACA decision of the morning. We had a big rainstorm, then in the afternoon I took my camera to try to take photos of the baby birds that hatched in my cat-sitter's bird house; I couldn't get enough light to focus, but since I had the camera, I walked through the woods path and around the neighborhood:















You can see the tailless squirrel who lives somewhere along the woods path, and one of two deer that were pretty unafraid of us until another neighbor approached walking a dog, plus the fish pond frog and butterflies in the lilies. We had leftover shepherd's pie for dinner with haroset, which we've decided we should eat far more often than just Passover. Then we watched this week's Burden of Truth (really good this season, though I hope they talk more specifically about the First Nations issues) and Blindspot (I'm so sick of Madeline and wish they'd give them a little more fun this final season), plus NatGeo on European geology.

Poem for Friday and Old Swim Club

The River
By Ralph Waldo Emerson

And I behold once more
My old familiar haunts; here the blue river,
The same blue wonder that my infant eye
Admired, sage doubting whence the traveller came,—
Whence brought his sunny bubbles ere he washed
The fragrant flag-roots in my father’s fields,
And where thereafter in the world he went.
Look, here he is, unaltered, save that now
He hath broke his banks and flooded all the vales
With his redundant waves.
Here is the rock where, yet a simple child,
I caught with bended pin my earliest fish,
Much triumphing, —and these the fields
Over whose flowers I chased the butterfly,
A blooming hunter of a fairy fine.
And hark! where overhead the ancient crows
Hold their sour conversation in the sky:—
These are the same, but I am not the same,
But wiser than I was, and wise enough
Not to regret the changes, tho’ they cost
Me many a sigh. Oh, call not Nature dumb;
These trees and stones are audible to me,
These idle flowers, that tremble in the wind,
I understand their faery syllables,
And all their sad significance. The wind,
That rustles down the well-known forest road—
It hath a sound more eloquent than speech.
The stream, the trees, the grass, the sighing wind,
All of them utter sounds of ’monishment
And grave parental love.
They are not of our race, they seem to say,
And yet have knowledge of our moral race,
And somewhat of majestic sympathy,
Something of pity for the puny clay,
That holds and boasts the immeasurable mind.
I feel as I were welcome to these trees
After long months of weary wandering,
Acknowledged by their hospitable boughs;
They know me as their son, for side by side,
They were coeval with my ancestors,
Adorned with them my country’s primitive times,
And soon may give my dust their funeral shade.

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I did lots of scanning on Thursday and have now scanned all the issues of Now Voyager, the main publication of Kate Mulgrew's fan club, which I ran for five years in the mid to late '90s. The text content has been available on my web site for years, but I'd had the print copies in file folders and hadn't looked at them in, well, decades. Not to brag, but I have to admit that they hold up really well. Any aggravation I had with the cast and crew of the show is long gone and mostly I'm just really grateful for the amazing women I met and friends I made, many of whom are still among my favorite people.

It was otherwise a quiet day: rain in the morning, nice weather by afternoon, a bit hot but we took a longer walk than usual, having both had doctor's appointments this week that encouraged more exercise. In the evening we watched Burden of Truth, which has been well written and therefore emotionally infuriating this season, and Blindspot, which is a bit all over the place but I love these characters, especially the women, and hope the remaining ones get a decent ending. I forgot to post these pictures from last weekend, the now-closed swim and tennis club I grew up going to behind my parents' neighborhood:

Poem for Friday and Bethany Beach Nostalgia

A Few Lines from Rehoboth Beach
By Fleda Brown

Dear friend, you were right: the smell of fish and foam
and algae makes one green smell together. It clears
my head. It empties me enough to fit down in my own

skin for a while, singleminded as a surfer. The first
day here, there was nobody, from one distance
to the other. Rain rose from the waves like steam,

dark lifted off the dark. All I could think of
were hymns, all I knew the words to: the oldest
motions tuning up in me. There was a horseshoe crab

shell, a translucent egg sack, a log of a tired jetty,
and another, and another. I walked miles, holding
my suffering deeply and courteously, as if I were holding

a package for somebody else who would come back
like sunlight. In the morning, the boardwalk opened
wide and white with sun, gulls on one leg in the slicks.

Cold waves, cold air, and people out in heavy coats,
arm in arm along the sheen of waves. A single boy
in shorts rode his skimboard out thigh-high, making

intricate moves across the March ice-water. I thought
he must be painfully cold, but, I hear you say, he had
all the world emptied, to practice his smooth stand.

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It was slightly cooler on Thursday but stickier until evening, when thunderstorms rolled through and made the cats hide down the basement. It was a pretty quiet day here of writing and scanning and following the protests and catching up on speeches and talks with late night hosts. We took a walk in the late afternoon and it was apparently too sticky even for the frog, let alone the bunnies and deer.

I got the laundry folded, we had leftovers for dinner, and we watched our new usual Thursday lineup, Burden of Truth (a little slow this season) and Blindspot (a little frenetic this season but some nice Reade/Zapata backstory this week). I really, really wish I could go to the beach, any beach, so here are some photos from a family trip in 1977 with cousins and the first camera I ever owned:

Poem for Friday and Many Deer

Fawn
By Mary Barnard

Out of a high meadow where flowers
bloom above cloud, come down;
pursue me with reasons for smiling without malice.

Bring mimic pride like that of the seedling fir,
surprise in the perfect leg-stems
and queries unstirred by recognition or fear
pooled in the deep eyes.

Come down by regions where rocks
lift through the hot haze of pain;
down landscapes darkened, crossed
by the rift of death-shock; place print
of a neat hoof on trampled ground
where not one leaf or root
remains unbitten; but come down
always, accompany me to the morass
of the decaying mind. There
we’ll share one rotted stump between us.

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Thursday was my father's birthday, so I had a family oriented day. After a day of scanning Paul's final two albums -- one from Sweden from when his parents visited in 1987, including an extensive family tree leading up to the modern relatives they visited, and one that his grandmother put together for all her grandchildren, with photos and anecdotes from her entire life -- we briefly saw my parents (socially distanced) to give my dad a birthday present, and got to try the chocolate covered apples my sister and her family had sent him.

Apparently it was National Burger Day, so we had (veggie) burgers for dinner with the leftover macaroni salad from Memorial Day. We watched Burden of Truth (lots of interesting women having complicated lives) and Blindspot (so much crazy in the storylines this season, I am just here for the characters), then three episodes of the fifth season of Arrested Development (still a delight). Here are some of the deer we saw in front of my parents' house today, in the woods near my house, and a newborn fawn in the last photo taken in New York by my sister!

Poem for Friday and Yellowstone 1992

Buffalo Spirit
By Lois Red Elk

Somewhere in beginnings, when light was
extended from Inyan the stone, hoof prints
were set for our path into relativity. We
existed there within the value of nature,
common beings where original womb was
the core of Wind Cave.  Our soul, our essence
was of the 4-legged, a spirit breathed into the
life body of Pte, the Female Buffalo for our
awakening.  I longed for that time, where
Tatanka Sicun, Buffalo Spirit as ancestor,
mingled with mine, a conception from the
power and matter of the hallowed, from the
one they call Taku Wakan, the Unknown
Sacred.  It was a divine plan for our future
life, a guide for our earthly life, two in one
soul.  Then yesterday it came, as expected
in this mind, transformed to the sacred level,
to be understood for these times.  It came
in the form of trucks and trailers carrying 
sacred beings into the realm of our higher
plains, the kind that honor land as Maka
Unchi, and Maka Ina, Grandmother Earth,
Mother Earth, giver of all life. It came as
moral knowledge, in collaboration with
like believers, perpetrations of wisdom, of
heart, of prayer, and from above. For this
believer, our twin hearts, our twin spirits
sprinted out of eons of demise and back into
our lives.  Their essence, a buoyance of
energy filling the present time with new air,
new thoughts, new prayers, new dreams for
our night time mingling. We roared with love,
with ceremony, with food, with appreciation.
All of us, the Tatanka Oyate, the Ikce Oyate,
the common people and the spirit of all living
beings, we roared the way we will always
remember from the voices of Wind Cave.

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The highlight of my Thursday was an unexpected Skype call from Paul's parents, who were hoping we could connect them with other family members now that they're turning the computer on again. So we texted Noelle to see if she was around, and ended up (after some technical difficulties) Skyping with her while she and her husband Tommy played with baby Penelope, who is now caught up in size and was smiling and adorable!

We caught up on this week's Legends (a little too bad college movie for my taste) after this week's Blindspot (a little too Mass Conspiracy Craziness for my taste for the final season, though always glad to see Bill Nye) and another episode of Hollywood (a little too silly revisionist history about homophobia and racism when everyone's cool with the lead actress living unmarried with a director). From today's scans, 1992 Yellowstone!