The ideation of small things

A changing in season

Waiting for Henry V

The Emperor Crosses the River to Visit His Own Son

I.
William of Newburgh says that when the emperor forded for a land he did not know, his companions complained: risk of treacherous waters. Yet the emperor wanted a son's company. The water was treacherous, and the plunge took his horse. For days the royal corpse was lost. The waves were ignorant of the respect due imperial dignity. That's William, and a laugh.

Or the emperor may have wanted to bathe, the day being hot. The lapping current was not so timid as it seemed. The emperor vanished either way, and became for William a moral of inscrutability. A judgment is here, but I do not know of what.

II.
Folding laundry and thinking of the son at the riverbank. This yellow towel with a monster's head: hers, whom I love. After every bath she folds herself in yellow skin, a ceaseless terrycloth terror. I'd cross a river for her company. I'd chance becoming someone else's moral.

I know the world does not work like this. The towel could be empty in my hands, always empty in my hands, and me here, wondering what river carried her away.

the lengthening of the days

lost tooth

Each time a tooth loosens in Katherine's mouth, each time some fragment of her baby self dislodges and makes itself a gift, she places the piece of bone under her pillow and passes a restless night. She waits for wings or small lights, or maybe a bell. She waits to know if this part of her is worth a coin, or a book, or some magic, something to make a loss desired.

Yaakov / A Hole in the Sky

bubble and squeak

We are a family without strong food traditions, having inherited few and rejecting most of them. Tonight's dinner, cooked for a dinner guest from Israel: vegetarian bubble and squeak (British), spicy oyster, button and portabello mushrooms (Chinese), palmiers with fresh berries (French). Many of our dinners come from cookbooks like 1000 Vegetarian Recipes. We cook them once, then wander onwards to other tastes.

in a Chevy Chase coffee shop

as if we needed the reminder

As if we needed the reminder that
the world can at 4:53 fall in shards and
slabs, take to dust a school
(children at a blackboard, children at their desks).
As if we needed again that postcard
from above that he was elsewhere, that
he didn't see that corpse we're watching on the news
or the baby who died still waiting or
even the orphanage, now gone, and the director
and his children, gone, rubble.

reoriented

First faculty meeting in three and half years in which the chair at the table's head was not mine.

trouble being present

Each morning when I run the hill at Tenley looms, makes me weary even before its slope impends. One morning familiar fatigue hit just at its start, by the VW dealership where a sale is perpetual. I braced myself, but vanished into thoughts of days to come. When I arrived at the Metro station that is the hill's end I couldn't remember space in between.

Too many days have become Tenley hills, swift movement and vague memory and no world better for having lived within it. Trouble being present.