Greetings from the Vent

Yeah I promised to return in style, but I also spent pretty much all of this rainy day finishing my France photo book before Shutterfly's Cyber Monday deals ended, and I succeeded, and even got half the laundry done, and made it to the food store and to the park in time for a Pokemon raid just as the one sliver of sun we got all day arrived at sunset, and watched the better-every-week Legends of Tomorrow with Modernist writers and X-Files fandom jokes, but now I feel like Effie in the photo below!

Poem for Thursday and Snowy Spring

A March Snow
By Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Let the old snow be covered with the new:
The trampled snow, so soiled, and stained, and sodden.
Let it be hidden wholly from our view
By pure white flakes, all trackless and untrodden.
When Winter dies, low at the sweet Spring's feet
Let him be mantled in a clean, white sheet.

Let the old life be covered by the new:
The old past life so full of sad mistakes,
Let it be wholly hidden from the view
By deeds as white and silent as snow-flakes.

Ere this earth life melts in the eternal Spring
Let the white mantle of repentance fling
Soft drapery about it, fold on fold,
Even as the new snow covers up the old.

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We spent the first full day of spring enjoying an all-day snowstorm. It wasn't very cold -- I'm not positive it was below freezing even in the morning -- but it snowed from dawn till nearly dusk, so we had almost four inches on the ground before it started to turn to slush. Tomorrow morning will be treacherous because the slush is going to ice over, but hopefully most of it will melt away during the day. The neighborhood was silent for hours before people emerged to sled and clean up.

Apart from taking walks in the snow and three rounds of shoveling, we had a quiet day -- Paul worked from home, Maddy was off work, we caught up on Black Lightning and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, I folded laundry and cropped photos. In the evening we watched what I hope will be the final episode of The X-Files, not its finest hour but a fine note to end on dramatically and ship-wise, and then Iron Man 2, which I will never love but I'd like better than the first one just for Natasha!

Poem for Thursday, X-Files, Prospect Park Zoo

26
By Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Your names toll in my dreams.
I pick up tinsel in the street. A nameless god
streaks my hand with blood. I look at the lighted trees
in windows & the spindles of pine tremble
in warm rooms. The flesh of home, silent.
How quiet the bells of heaven must be, cold
with stars who cannot rhyme their brilliance
to our weapons. What rouses our lives each moment?
Nothing but life dares dying. My memory, another obituary.
My memory is a cross. Face down. A whistle in high grass.
A shadow pouring down the sill of calamity.
Your names wake me in the nearly dark hour.
The candles in our windows flicker
where your faces peer in, ask us
questions light cannot answer.

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Half my afternoon and evening got derailed talking to people on Facebook (in some cases people I didn't know) about the student walkouts, gun control, and politics in general, so I will keep this brief. It wasn't a super exciting day anyway apart from the fact that, using $20 in bonus bucks from my Sears credit card that I didn't have to spend any money to get in the first place, I got us a new toaster oven, since the heating element in ours hasn't worked right in ages and the handle was kind of melting off.

We had chili pie for dinner in honor of Pi Day, unfortunately while we were watching the very bloody start of this week's X-Files with Rose who had stopped by to see us and the cats (I still liked it better than last week's terrible witchcraft story, in part because vampire stereotypes bother me less and in part because of the shippiness). The didactic Designated Survivor always suffers by comparison afterward. Here are some photos from last fall at the Prospect Park Zoo in Brooklyn with Adam:

Poem for Friday, Richmond Orchids, Bones

From 'Lanting Xu (Preface of the Orchid Pavilion)'
By Wang Xizhi
Translated by TC Lai, Monica Lai, and Liu Yi Ru

Overlooking us are lofty mountains and steep peaks.
Around us are dense wood and slender bamboos, as well as limpid swift stream flowing around which reflected the sunlight as it flowed past either side of the pavilion.
Taking advantage of this, we sit by the stream drinking from wine cups which float gently on the water.

Despite of the absence of the grandeur of musical accompaniment, drinking wine and chanting poems give us delight and allow us to exchange our deep feelings.

As for this day, the sky is bright, the air is fresh and the breeze is mild and bracing.

Looking up, we admire the beauty of the sky and wonder at the immensity of the universe.
Looking around us, we see the myriad variety and wonder at their extraordinary diversity.

Stretching our sights and freeing our minds, we can stretch the pleasures of our senses (of sight and sound) to the limit.

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While my friends in the north were waiting for their power to come back on and their lawns to be cleared, I got to see some spring on Thursday! There are now plum blossoms in the park along with the crocuses and snowdrops, and there are a couple of lawns on my street with blooming daffodils, though ours are still tightly curled yellow-tipped buds. Maddy returned from California, though I barely saw her -- she dropped off her things, showered, and went out with friends. As a reminder that spring is coming, here are orchids at Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden in Richmond from last March:















We spent the evening watching the final three episodes of Bones, which I am quite sad to have finished, as it remained enjoyable through its entire 12-season run, and very glad I watched the era of binge-watching, since I have no idea whether I'd have felt it jumped the shark at various points if I didn't know it ended well. Favorite lines from the last episodes included the discussion of writing a dissertation on the effects of gamma transformation on the Hulk's bones and Booth's declaring, "We're way better than Mulder and Scully"...to which Brennan responded, "I don't know what that means."

Poem for Thursday and Colorful Art

Spiral
By Roddy Lumsden

These years lift over coldly now: Aprils
and Augusts are gifted to ice, or sprawl
into mid-summers or year ends—pillars
of lesser standing. Still come no replies

to boyish queries, how the belly sleeper
buoys, begins again, becomes poor soul
or bull of appetite; why when the pearls
drop, no spool dares connect the ripples.

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Though we were warned to expect bad weather, the storm currently making people north of us miserable only barely skirted the region here, meaning that it was chilly and overcast but we got little rain and only a few flurries here and there. I got to enjoy the park and get some shopping done, though it was a fairly quiet day mostly about chores and getting work done. We watched this week's not-good X-Files with its bad cliches about witchcraft and too many dead children, and Designated Survivor which had a much more interesting story than the preview suggested.

I never got the bed made because there were two cats on it when I got up, soon joined by a third who refused to move until  the afternoon. Here are some more special exhibits from the Baltimore Museum of Art: Spiral Play: Loving in the '80s, a display of late African-American artist Al Loving's three-dimensional rag-paper collages using spirals to signify the continuity of life, and The Succession of Nature, a full-room exhibit by Baltimore's own Phaan Howng in collaboration with Blue Water Baltimore using the colors of toxic waste to show how pollution damages local waterways.

Poem for Thursday, The Post, X-Files, Spring Flowers

The feet of people walking home
By Emily Dickinson

The feet of people walking home
With gayer sandals go--
The Crocus--till she rises
The Vassal of the Snow--
The lips at Hallelujah
Long years of practise bore
Till bye and bye these Bargemen
Walked singing on the shore.

Pearls are the Diver's farthings
Extorted from the sea--
Pinions--the Seraph's wagon
Pedestrian once--as we--
Night is the morning's Canvas
Larceny--legacy--
Death, but our rapt attention
To Immortality.

My figures fail to tel me
How far the Village lies--
Whose peasants are the Angels--
Whose Cantons dot the skies--
My Classics veil their faces--
My faith that Dark adores--
Which from its solemn abbeys
Such resurrection pours.

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I got to see Cheryl on a Wednesday, which I believe is a first in the decade and a half that I've known her -- Wednesday is new comic day and she always had to work until this month. We had Mirch Masala at the mall and went to see The Post, which I had seen before but she had not; it's still excellent, oddly overlooked so far this awards season given the oddly excessive hype for other films though it's pretty traditional in structure, so much so that we came back to my house afterward and watched the obvious sequel, All the President's Men, which remains the gold standard for journalism movies and remains terrific to this day.

After Cheryl went home, Paul and I watched this week's X-Files, which is hilarious, somewhat distressing, gloriously well acted and beautifully directed -- really, except for that first episode, the entire season has been wonderful -- and this week's Designated Survivor, which is didactic, clumsily scripted, frustratingly predictable, and worth watching only for a couple of actors. In between we watched a Bones episode with totally forgettable forensics but fun storylines about Brennan's surprise party, Angela's Genius Grant, and Daisy's NFL job. Here are some of the local crocuses and daffodils, plus a squirrel enjoying the weather:

Poem for Thursday and DC Winter

White-Eyes
By Mary Oliver

In winter
    all the singing is in
         the tops of the trees
             where the wind-bird

with its white eyes
    shoves and pushes
         among the branches.
             Like any of us

he wants to go to sleep,
    but he's restless—
         he has an idea,
             and slowly it unfolds

from under his beating wings
    as long as he stays awake.
         But his big, round music, after all,
             is too breathy to last.

So, it's over.
    In the pine-crown
         he makes his nest,
             he's done all he can.

I don't know the name of this bird,
    I only imagine his glittering beak
         tucked in a white wing
             while the clouds—

which he has summoned
    from the north—
         which he has taught
             to be mild, and silent—

thicken, and begin to fall
    into the world below
         like stars, or the feathers
               of some unimaginable bird

that loves us,
    that is asleep now, and silent—
         that has turned itself
             into snow.

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We had an ice storm in the very early hours on Wednesday, so that local schools were at first delayed, then closed, and nobody wanted to venture on the sidewalks and roads unless they had to. Paul worked from home, as did most of his office, so we had lunch together and took turns distracting cats from sleeping on vents (Rose came to visit them, too, and we watched the Team Thor shorts).

This week's X-Files felt like much too little, too late re: Skinner, who deserved a more comprehensive backstory years ago or else deserved to remain an enigma -- everyone involved should have much stronger feelings for and about each other -- but at least it wasn't ruined by Cancer Man. Since it's still winter, here are some photos toward evening around DC last September:

Poem for Sunday and Brookside Gardens

The Kindness
By Jan Beatty

Banff, Alberta

The mother elk and 2 babies are sniffing
the metal handle of the bear-proof trash bin.
I remember the instructions for city people:
3 football fields of space between you &
the elk if their babies are with them.
I’m backing up slowly,
watching the calves run into each other
as they bend to eat grass/look up
at the mother at the same time.
The caramel color of their coat,
the sloping line of their small snouts &
I want to hold that beauty,
steal it for me,
but I’m only on football field # 2 & walking
into the woods past the lodge pole pines.
Their fragility, their awkward bumping
opens me to a long ago time—
              a hand on the door,
              I was walking in
to the psych hospital in Pittsburgh,
feeling broken and stripped down—
              a hand on the door
              from around my body
& I looked up to see the body
of a man, who said:
Let me get that for you—
              a hand on the door
              & the bottom of me
              dropped/
I couldn’t breathe for the kindness.
I couldn’t say how deep that went
for me.
I had been backing up, awkward/
I had been blind to my own beauty.

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Saturday was a very nice albeit fairly cold day, so after a quiet morning and lunch, we went to Brookside Gardens to see the spring flowers blooming in the conservatory -- orchids, snapdragons, daisies, birds of paradise -- and we discovered snowdrops outside in the flower beds, surrounded by fields of geese. We stopped on the way home at Mom's Organic Market, which had insanely long lines -- literally wrapping around half the store, at least 20 minutes -- but we got our vegan food, so yay!

















Adam is here for our friends' Super Bowl party, having arrived this evening, which hopefully means he's missed the snow. We spent the evening watching The X-Files' VR episodes starting with the one William Gibson wrote from 1998 before son's second birthday, plus "The Unnatural" just because it's awesome. Adam has been telling us about lectures he's attended at NASA, which has a great internship program, and now he's going to take Maddy out for milkshakes while we watch the "news" on SNL.