a moon, worn as if it had been a shell

I'm off to Seattle this afternoon, where I'll be meeting some new people and attending the Caregifted benefit on Friday night. Word is that Molly Ringwald will be singing jazz and the great poet Robert Pinsky attending. Heather McHugh, the Master of Ceremonies, Saint of Caregiver Recognition and Poet is responsible for this beautiful event, and I'm very excited to be a part of it! If you haven't already, please visit the Caregifted website and look around. There's a wonderful video, photos, testimonials and even a place to donate, if you're so inclined. I look back on my week in Victoria, a grant from Caregifted, and realize, yet again, that what I received was literally life-changing.

On another note, are ya'll watching the second season of House of Cards? No sooner had Downton Abbey finished then I opened up my Netflix and watched the first episode. I won't type any spoilers here, but what happened churned my stomach. I was into the first season, and have just now finished the second and third episodes, but I'm wondering why exactly I'm watching such vile people. I've never been a big fan of Kevin Spacey, although I concede he's an incredible actor, and the relationship between him and his scary ice-queen wife, played by Robin Wright, is something to behold. But, it's just gross -- the whole thing -- and at the same time sort of boring, the way perversity is sometimes boring.

Stupid Meditation on Peace

BY ROBERT PINSKY

        “He does not come to coo.”
                    —Gerard Manley Hopkins

Insomniac monkey-mind ponders the Dove,

Symbol not only of Peace but sexual

Love, the couple nestled and brooding.

After coupling, the human animal needs

The woman safe for nine months and more.

But the man after his turbulent minute or two

Is expendable. Usefully rash, reckless

For defense, in his void of redundancy

Willing to death and destruction.

Monkey-mind envies the male Dove

Who equally with the female secretes

Pigeon milk for the young from his throat.

For peace, send all human males between

Fourteen and twenty-five to school

On the Moon, or better yet Mars.

But women too are capable of Unpeace,

Yes, and we older men too, venom-throats.

Here’s a great comic who says on our journey

We choose one of two tributaries: the River

Of Peace, or the River of Productivity.

The current of Art he says runs not between

Banks with birdsong in the fragrant shadows—

No, an artist must follow the stinks and rapids

Of the branch that drives the millstones and dynamos.

Is peace merely a vacuum, the negative

Of creation, or the absence of war?

The teaching says Peace is a positive energy.

Still something in me resists that sweet milk,

My mind resembles my restless, inferior cousin

Who fires his shit in handfuls from his cage.

(lifted from the Poetry Foundation page)