Poem for Thursday and Canal Ducklings

Fort Night
By Lisa Olstein

The snake is
a sleeve the deer

puts on, its mouth
a beaded cuff

in the haze men
make of morning

with each release
of their fist-gripped

guns. Is this a dream
of shame? Is this

a dream of potential
unmet, of possibility

undone? School,
no pants. Brush,

no teeth. Podium,
no poems. Open

door, all wall.
Dear Monster,

none of the guests
we disinvited arrive.

In the darkness
no lion comes.

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Wednesday was quiet around here, which was lovely. I spent all day working on computer tasks and that was fine. We took a walk in the late afternoon when it was a little less hot and saw bunnies, plus I met up with someone in the neighborhood to do a Kyurem raid so I could finish a quest requiring that I catch a dragon. We got Ethiopian food for dinner from Sheba, a definite highlight!

The Orioles and Nationals both won, so even though I think baseball now is a bad idea, I guess I am paying attention. We watched Agents of SHIELD, which remains good, and I finished my Merlin rewatch, which makes me sad because I really enjoyed it again -- none of the things I nitpicked before bothered me this time. Here is another wood duck family from the canal with smaller babies:

Greetings from Blarrrgh

I have had a Day (and it isn't over until I finish running Malwarebytes to figure out why PayPal keeps looping the capcha page and won't let me log in to see whether my account has been compromised, since I got an email receipt for something I never bought at an address I don't use). We had a minor crisis involving out of town relatives that I can't talk about in detail for privacy reasons, and though everyone is fine, it is going to cause complications that were going to be difficult enough even without Covid. Anyway, my day was otherwise uploading photos and taking a walk in the heat, watching Stargirl, and now I'm watching fifth season Merlin which is not exactly relaxing. Look, our neighbor's cherry tomatoes are coming ripe, if they can pick them before the bunnies do:

Greetings from the C&O Canal

We're watching the final episode of Cursed so I'll keep this short (lots of women in interesting roles, but also an insane amount of violence that I forgive only because I love watching the Red Paladins die in the most horrible ways). It was nearly 100 degrees on Saturday, we went for a walk along the C&O Canal where it was mostly shady though still beastly hot, then we had dinner from Not Your Average Joe's down my parents' basement in the air conditioning six feet apart. Nature was in all its glory in the canal and river, happy and less so -- we saw baby ducks and many singing frogs, and we also saw a snapping turtle eating a frog and some kind of waterfowl moving very quickly away from another of its kind with a big fish in its mouth:

Poem for Saturday and Assawoman Bay Wildlife

We're watching Cursed, which is the biggest fantasy mash-up ever -- in the first five episodes there are visual references and parallels not only to Merlin and other Arthurian stories, which are obvious, but The Lord of the Rings, Avatar, Outlander, Game of Thrones, Kingdom of Heaven, Vikings, Maleficent, Brave, even Carnival Row and The Witcher -- which I'm enjoying despite some silliness, a lot of blood, and an excess of attempted rapes and rape jokes, possibly because the early Christians are the most villainous villains who ever walked the earth and I'd take Denethor any day over them -- so I'm distracted.

Let's see, what did I do Friday? Chatted with high school friends (just a couple of us this week, everyone else was busy), did some laundry, got all my packages for the week in one day including one that was supposed to go as a gift to someone else in a different city, dropped off the return package at the UPS Store in my fanciest Lilly Pulitzer mask, took a walk in extreme afternoon heat, and had sausage and mac and cheese for dinner. I'm still missing the beach so here are some photos from Assawoman Bay State Wildlife Area:

Poem for Tuesday and C&O Canal Deer

Deer
By Chris Powici

as crows fly
in the dawn light
on the cold hill
the deer are running

the thud of their hooves
on the bed of the stream
is the drum that rocks
the roots of the birch
and the wind that shakes
the birch tree’s leaves

rain is their tribe song
rain is their robe

snow is the dust
of the bones of deer
falling to earth

and earth is the dark
deep silence of things
where you dream yourself
human, alive
watching the red deer running
on the wall of a cave

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Monday was very warm and pretty quiet around here. I did a bunch of writing in the morning, then laundry and some jewelry repair/repurposing in the afternoon -- fixing earrings, changing clasps on an old necklace to turn it into a mask strap and changing charms on mini goddess belts. We took a walk in the late afternoon when it was a bit cooler and saw several bunnies, though the frogs were hiding.

We had chicken picante with pineapple for dinner and I sent older son a replacement for a mug he broke. Evening involved Antiques Roadshow and a National Geographic show on Egyptian queens, plus posting a bunch of photos. Now I'm watching the end of Merlin's third season (in which Morgana finally reveals how evil she is and I can't even feel sorry for Uther, who deserves her even if no one else does). Deer by the canal:

Poem for Tuesday and Good Omens Anniversary

Dirt Being Dirt
By Carl Phillips

The orchard was on fire, but that didn’t stop him from slowly walking
straight into it, shirtless, you can see where the flames have
foliaged—here, especially—his chest. Splashed by the moon,
it almost looks like the latest proof that, while decoration is hardly
ever necessary, it’s rarely meaningless: the tuxedo’s corsage,
fog when lit scatteredly, swift, from behind—swing of a torch, the lone
match, struck, then wind-shut…How far is instinct from a thing
like belief? Not far, apparently. At what point is believing so close
to knowing, that any difference between the two isn’t worth the fuss,
finally? A tamer of wolves tames no foxes, he used to say, as if avoiding
the question. But never meaning to. You broke it. Now wear it broken.

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The only excitement around here on Monday was a massive thunderstorm that bounced my internet just long enough to undo hours of work uploading and labeling photos. Otherwise my day was spent uploading and labeling said photos (the former twice, the latter to be finished tomorrow hopefully), plus laundry and a bunch of scanning (Shakespeare and Austen ephemera completed, other authors up next).

We had tacos for dinner and watched Antiques Roadshow, then some Lost Cities With Albert Lin though now I'm watching season three Merlin and have no idea why it took me so long to do a rewatch. Here is my anniversary card made by Paul, Good Omens-themed since we're sharing a 30th anniversary this year (speaking of things I need to rewatch) -- I don't believe in the "definitely not":

Poem for Thursday and Fancy Birds

The Peacock at Alderton
By Geoffrey Hill

Nothing to tell why I cannot write
in re Nobody; nobody to narrate this
latter acknowledgement: the self that counts
words to a line, accountable survivor
pain-wedged, pinioned in the cleft trunk,
less petty than a sprite, poisonous as Ariel
to Prospero's own knowledge. In my room
a vase of peacock feathers. I will attempt
to describe them, as if for evidence
on which a life depends. Except for the eyes
they are threadbare, the threads hanging
as from a luminate tough weed in February.
But those eyes—like a Greek letter,
omega, fossiled in an Indian shawl;
like a shaved cross section of living tissue,
the edge metallic blue, the core of jet,
the white of the eye in fact closer to beige,
the whole encircled with a black-fringed green.
The peacock roosts alone on a Scots pine
at the garden end, in blustery twilight
his lambent cloak stark as a warlock's cape,
the maharajah-bird that scavenges
close by the stone-troughed, stone-terraced, stone-ensurfed
Suffolk shoreline; at times displays his scream.

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Wednesday started cool and overcast and ended raining buckets. In between, things were pretty uneventful -- I did do two socially distanced Pokemon raids, one from my car near the tennis courts and one from my house with a remote raid pass while a neighbor used one as well, and I fought with Google Photos which was so much easier to use when it could be set to sync automatically with Google Drive.

We never managed to take a walk because the thunderstorms moved in, so I watched some Merlin while folding laundry and in the evening we watched this week's The 100 (dark but good this season) and Agents of SHIELD (a thing of beauty -- I love Sousa's storyline, both his noble intentions and his shifted fate, and the film noir format made it witty and clever). Fancy birds from Parrot World:

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.

--------

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 Saturday and Foggy Evening

Fog
By Carl Sandburg

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

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It was a rainy Friday so we did not do much outdoors that was exciting. Adam spent the entire day visiting Katherine in Fredericksburg; Daniel went out to lunch with my father, then we watched the last two episodes of the Merlin miniseries, which was enjoyable though the women's roles stink.

A friend sent me an invitation to the new Deoxys EX raid just before dinner, so I went and raided with my local PoGo group, then we had dinner with my parents and caught Daniel up on Doctor Who around the Alamo Bowl. After all the rain during the day, the temperature went up a bit and we had amazing nighttime fog:

Poem for Saturday, Oxon Hill Farm, Shakaar

Sonnetesque
By Lynn Emanuel

I love its smallness: as though our whole town
were a picture postcard and our feelings
were on vacation: ourselves in mini-
ature, shopping at tiny sales, buying
the newspapers--small and pale and square
as sugar cubes--at the fragile, little curb.
The way the streetlight is really a table
lamp where now we sit and where real
night, (which is very tall and black and
at our backs), where for a moment
the night is forced to bend down and look
through these tiny windows, forced to come
closer and put its hand on our shoulder
and stoop over the book to read the fine print.

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I had both kids home on Friday, since Adam is finished with finals and Daniel doesn't finish his winter break until Monday. I offered to take them out to lunch, but Daniel wanted to sleep late and Adam didn't want to eat out so much as get some ginger peach hot sauce to eat with tofu, so we stopped at CVS for a prescription and the food store for some health food, bought a couple of bottles of the hot sauce from California Tortilla and came home for lunch.

It was chilly but too gorgeous out not to take a walk -- three deer sightings this afternoon -- though I also had to finish a review of DS9's "Shakaar". We had dinner with my parents and came home for the new Nikita (quite a dark episode and also a little kinky, heh), then I left on the Beauty and the Beast rerun because as much as I disliked Kristin Kreuk as Lana, that's how much I love Catherine. Then we watched Merlin making Arthur sound like a lovestruck girl.

Here are some photos from Oxon Hill Farm a few weeks ago, when it was quite chilly so some of the animals were hiding, though we got to see cows, horses, chickens, wild turkeys, historical farm equipment, and a goose who either wanted to eat our cameras or was auditioning to play Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors: