Poem for Sunday and Carderock Flowers

The Bluebell
By Emily Brontë

The Bluebell is the sweetest flower
That waves in summer air:
Its blossoms have the mightiest power
To soothe my spirit’s care.

There is a spell in purple heath
Too wildly, sadly dear;
The violet has a fragrant breath,
But fragrance will not cheer,

The trees are bare, the sun is cold,
And seldom, seldom seen;
The heavens have lost their zone of gold,
And earth her robe of green.

And ice upon the glancing stream
Has cast its sombre shade;
And distant hills and valleys seem
In frozen mist arrayed.

The Bluebell cannot charm me now,
The heath has lost its bloom;
The violets in the glen below,
They yield no sweet perfume.

But, though I mourn the sweet Bluebell,
’Tis better far away;
I know how fast my tears would swell
To see it smile to-day.

For, oh! when chill the sunbeams fall
Adown that dreary sky,
And gild yon dank and darkened wall
With transient brilliancy;

How do I weep, how do I pine
For the time of flowers to come,
And turn me from that fading shine,
To mourn the fields of home!

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It was overcast and drizzly at times on Saturday -- kind of Seattle weather, though not too cold. I did a bunch of photo scanning and sorting in the morning, then we had bagels and went to walk along the canal, this time at Carderock, where we've had luck in previous years seeing frogs though perhaps because of the weather we weren't as lucky today. Still, we took a nice long walk while seeing few other pedestrians, so social distancing was easy, and there were ducks and birds and lots of bluebells down by the river.

















Now that it's free, we binged the rest of Picard, which I'd thought was going downhill but nothing could have prepared me for the sheer awfulness of the finale. I'll have to do a separate post about it so I don't spoil people who haven't watched yet, but objectively I think it was worse than both the Voyager and La Femme Nikita finales though I loved those shows more so I hated the endings more, and if I loved Picard more I'd be devastated. We also watched Hail Caesar, which has its flaws but was a lot more relaxing and fun!

Poem for Thursday, Carderock, Designated Survivor

Forty-Seven Minutes
By Nick Flynn

Years later I'm standing before a roomful of young writers in
a high school in Texas. I've asked them to locate an image
in a poem we’d just read — their heads at this moment
are bowed to the page. After some back & forth about the
grass & a styrofoam cup, a girl raises her hand & asks,
Does it matter? I smile — it is as if the universe balanced
on those three words & we've landed in the unanswerable. I
have to admit that no, it doesn't, not really, matter, if rain
is an image or rain is an idea or rain is a sound in our heads.
But, I whisper, leaning in close, to get through the next
forty-seven minutes we might have to pretend it does.

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My week is on a repeat cycle of complaining about my back, going to take a walk somewhere scenic to make my back feel better and enjoy the spring, more complaining about my back, and more walking in the neighborhood to make my back feel better and see flowers and bunnies. Today the walk was at Carderock, mostly on the canal side rather than climbing over the rocks by the river, where we saw frogs, turtles, ducks, and -- far down the hillside -- bluebells:













Maddy had a friend over after work and went out to dinner with him; the rest of us, except the cats, had pizza and watched Designated Survivor, starting by catching up from last week before the new one came on (I like the wannabe La Femme Nikita parts a lot better than the wannabe West Wing parts). In good news, the Capitals, Wizards, Nationals, and Orioles all won, so no one has broken local hearts yet, not even in the playoffs!

Poem for Friday, Tacoma Sea Glass, Designated Survivor

Sunday Mornings
By Steven Sanchez

Before sunrise, I collected the Sunday
ads and thumbed through the pages
of models I’d seen in my friend’s catalog

stored between his mattress and frame;
women wore bras with elegant black
letters scrawled across the page,

Limited Time Offer never touching
their skin.  But it was the men who excited
me.  Like a magician, I severed waists

from torsos, cut out pairs of briefs
with left-handed scissors and pressed
my thumb against their cotton

daggers.  Just below their necks
I sawed again, took the faces
beardless, square-jawed,

and pasted them onto broad shoulders
whose trapezius muscles rose
like pyramids I imagined climbing,

navigating the constellations of bodies
spread across the sky blue sheets
on my bed.  I rolled out the glue

stick from its sheath, the white tip
of a magic wand that could attach
the wide shoulders of Hanes models

onto lean torsos of the Fruit of the Loom
models and align their waists with
the briefs and legs of the Cheetah models.

I knew to hide these men inside
the pages of my dictionary, though words
clung to the wet curves of their bodies

like newspaper ink on my hands,
headlines and stories stained on my skin.

--------

Thursday mostly involved work and chores, driving Madeline back and forth, enjoying the gorgeous not-too-warm weather around the neighborhood, and snuggling with cats who are unimpressed with impending autumn. Here are some photos from Into the Deep at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, an exhibit exploring marine life using glass as a medium:


A glass octopus by Jennifer Caldwell and Jason Chakravarty


...and another by Paul DeSomma and Marsha Blaker-DeSomma, who made this in the Museum of Glass, where they met


This is Paul DeSomma's shark-tooth-lookalike Optical Effects OE071601


And his wife's Luscious Symbiosis


Benjamin Kikkert's Flotsam Harvest, Hollow Catch


Kait Rhoads' Red Polyp, made from hundreds of handmade pieces of glass


A lion fish by Vittorio Costantini


And Raven Skyriver's Tyee

Around baseball postseason games, we also watched the first three episodes of Designated Survivor, which had come highly recommended. After a couple of seasons of 24, I'm a Kiefer Sutherland agnostic, but I watched Nikita through to the last season, so having Maggie Q and Virginia Madsen unraveling and creating conspiracies respectively makes me very happy.

Poem for Tuesday, American Ultra, Viking Golf

Night Golf
By Billy Collins

I remember the night I discovered,
lying in bed in the dark,
that a few imagined holes of golf
worked much better than a thousand sheep,

that the local links,
not the cloudy pasture with its easy fence,
was the greener path to sleep.

How soothing to stroll the shadowy fairways,
to skirt the moon-blanched bunkers
and hear the night owl in the woods.

Who cared about the score
when the club swung with the ease of air
and I glided from shot to shot
over the mown and rolling ground,
alone and drowsy with my weightless bag?

Eighteen small cups punched into the
bristling grass,
eighteen flags limp on their sticks
in the silent, windless dark,

but in the bedroom with its luminous clock
and propped-open windows,
I got only as far as the seventh hole
before I drifted easily away -

the difficult seventh, 'The Tester' they called it,
where, just as on the earlier holes,
I tapped in, dreamily, for birdie.

--------

Monday was pretty quiet around here. Adam went to College Park to do more training for his job, Madeline did research for the job interview she has on Wednesday, I tried to catch up on work and correspondence that I missed while we were out of town last week. Adam got home a bit after lunch and we all hung out for a while watching funny videos.

Paul was going to make pizza, but discovered that we didn't have enough flour, so instead we had veggie crab cakes and then we all watched American Ultra, which was like a super-violent mash-up of La Femme Nikita and The Man With One Red Shoe. Here are some family photos from Viking Golf in Fenwick Island last week:

Poem for Saturday, Canal Locks, Reign of Fire

My Bright Aluminum Tumblers
By Michael Ryan

Who are you
long legged
woman in my dream
kissing me open mouthed
pressing me for ice
we fetch together naked
from the freezer
with bright aluminum tumblers
red deep blue purple
icy water
so cold it hurts
lips and teeth and membrane
lacy lattices of ice
shattering on our tongues
who are you
how could I have forgotten
my bright aluminum tumblers
I had to hold with both hands
they couldn't be broken
even if I dropped them
that's how little I was

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"Aluminum tumblers--neon-bright, slippery, colder than the liquid inside them--were my first drinking glasses after sippy cups," Ryan told Poets.org. "Why did they surface fifty-something years later in this erotic dream? The poem doesn't know, and neither do I."

It was warmer on Friday and extremely sunny. We had a relatively quiet morning that involved a Reddit vs Tumblr debate and may have involved eating chocolate-covered toffee. Then we drove down River Road first to Riley's Lock, then to Violette's Lock, where in both places we walked under the trees along the somewhat muddy canal towpath and saw the sun gleaming on the Potomac. It must have been too cold for turtles, but we also saw herons, ducks, and lots of other birds at both parks:


A great blue heron at Violette's Lock.


One of the gates that let the canal be filled from the Potomac River is here.


We saw ducks in the canal...


...and white oaks growing alongside it.


We saw a heron at Riley's Lock too, though across the muddy canal basin...


...and these diving birds which may or may not be grebes in the river.


There were a whole bunch of mallards in the canal, too.


And the sunlight on the Potomac was dazzling.

After a stop at a food store, we came home, watched Maryland lose the Military Bowl, and went to dinner at my parents' where my mother made chocolate roll for dessert. We were going to watch the Nikita series finale but realized we really needed to catch up on last week's episode first, so we watched Reign of Fire, which holds up pretty well, even the special effects -- the cast is much better than the script, but Bale, Butler, McConaughey, and Scorupco give their all, and it's fun to see Siddig, Krige, and Gleeson.

Poem for Saturday, Brookside, Doctor Bashir I Presume

My Cocoon Tightens
By Emily Dickinson

My cocoon tightens, colors tease,
I ’m feeling for the air;
A dim capacity for wings
Degrades the dress I wear.

A power of butterfly must be
The aptitude to fly,
Meadows of majesty concedes
And easy sweeps of sky.

So I must baffle at the hint
And cipher at the sign,
And make much blunder, if at last
I take the clew divine.

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It poured all day Friday, and it was chilly and generally gloomy. Between the dark and having two cats sleeping on me, I had trouble getting out of bed. I wouldn't be so annoyed about the weather now if we didn't have a snowstorm looming that is going to ruin my birthday weekend, when we were planning to go to Richmond to art museums and holiday lights; right now it looks like travel on Sunday is going to be impossible, sigh. I spent the productive part of the morning finishing a review of Deep Space Nine's superb "Doctor Bashir, I Presume", then I picked Adam up from school so he didn't have to walk in the pouring rain. He wanted to go to the bank to deposit some checks and upgrade his savings account, so we did that, then we went to the food store to get Nutella in case we get snowed in, lest he should be deprived for a few days.

After dinner we went to Best Buy to look at tablets and transformer books though I'm not sure that even with birthday and holiday money I'll be able to afford the one I want and may have to wait either till the Galaxy Tab Lite comes out or till my anniversary, whichever comes first. In happier news, Adam was admitted to the University of Wisconsin -- the first of what we hope will be several acceptances this month. When we came home, we realized that we had never watched last week's Nikita, so instead of watching this week's out of order, I subjected my husband to my new bargain copy of Real Steel, which remains very entertaining despite a really silly script -- action movies are all about the performances to me -- and has two fun making-of featurettes and a blooper reel. Sunny summer and fall flower pics from Brookside:

Poem for Wednesday and Wheaton Flowers

The Living Beauty
By W.B. Yeats

I'll say and maybe dream I have drawn content--
Seeing that time has frozen up the blood,
The wick of youth being burned and the oil spent--
From beauty that is cast out of a mould
In bronze, or that in dazzling marble appears,
Appears, but when we have gone is gone again,
Being more indifferent to our solitude
Than 'twere an apparition. O heart, we are old,
The living beauty is for younger men,
We cannot pay its tribute of wild tears.

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It rained all day, I did work and chores, Adam called for a ride home from school so he didn't have to be out in the rain, I did some Chanukah shopping, that's about all the excitement here. Rosie and Daisy would like to report that they are being starved, but this is not true -- they were fed at 7 and are not yet due.

Evening TV was Agents of SHIELD, whose details I can't even remember because I watched the season premiere of Nikita immediately afterward and liked that better, then we caught up on Beauty and the Beast which had some good moments and some melodrama. Some flowers at Brookside Gardens from late summer: