Date night tonight and after a quick stop at Crate and Barrel (for what is date night without the domestic, capitalist foray into overpriced home goods?) we went out to our favorite new New Year's Eve find of a movie theatre to see a movie (my pick). Because I have a lifelong fascination with the ballet and the bizarre lives of ballerinas, I chose, of course, Black Swan.
Portman's performance was spot-on, if relentlessly earnest, but the movie overall lacked control over its tone, with inadvertant humor and high melodrama. It might be that the years have bred an impatience in me for art and the sufferers of art or it might be that I was just put-off by the countless bloody nail scenes, but I felt like this was the type of movie I have kind of outgrown.
In any case, after a long week of what felt like walking pneumonia, I had to get out. And I do have a new cube-shaped plum colored mimic end table, all in preparation for my mommy's visit.
Where have I been remiss? Well, considering the sick week, I am still text-ahead. I have been staying away from my telephone and spending time reconnecting with writer-friends and writing goals. I am deep into a new story that is dark and exciting and I have been thinking as my novel's narrator and imagining more of her story into place well enough to have written the ending a few days ago (though only the first fifty pages and the ending are really in place, there's a whole lot of middle to write yet.) But my priorities are falling back into place, at long last and hurrah!
For Keith's birthday, I usually wax nostalgic over some undergraduate memory, usually a driving-related one. I recalled finding a slide of a meteor or some starry-thing on a gas pump late at night during one of our crazy drives and there was something mysterious and hopeful about that find. Something promising and wherever Keith is I hope that window of starlight was foreshadowing.
Tonight me and mine are awake way too late. He: trying to unravel the Botticelli website for me and me, posting I-know-not-what to I-know-less-who and it's the middle of the middle of those nights that remind me of driving closer and closer to dawn or memories so sleep-deprived that I can't exactly recall if I saw a play called Sea Marks in some venue I can only remember by impression and I am happy for the life I have.
If I Ever Mistake You For a Poem
No body was ever composed
from words, not the hipsway
of verse, the iambic beat of a heart.
Yet inside you, a sestina
of arteries, the villanelle of villi,
sonnets between your shoulder blades.
If I were more obsessive I'd follow
the alliteration of age spots across
your arms. But I have exchanged
my microscope for a stethoscope
as I want to listen inside you, past
your repetition, your free verse of skin.
How easy it is to fall for your internal
organs. Your arrhythmia is charming
hidden in the ballad of body,
your gurgling stanzas, your lyric sigh.
Kelli Russell Agodon
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