Poem for Tuesday

Subterranean
By Jill Bialosky

She did not know when it would happen
or how it would overtake her
or whether she would allow herself.
All I know is that she could not take it anymore
lying day after day underneath the hollow tree, waiting,
consumed by a kind of fire,
wondering if there is a type of love
that saves us or whether there was more
to the world than the familiar paradise
of her mother's complicated and vivid garden.
She smelled nectar in the labored-over
chrysanthemum and amaryllis,
but could not taste it.
I know if it were a flower it would have bloomed
in the cumulus overhead
void of volition and sin,
translucent as the filmy underside of a leaf.
If it were an animal she would have followed it,
but it was amorphous as feeling, weightless as dust,
turbulent as an entire undisclosed universe
radiating from the inner core beneath the earth
and, still, she longed for it.
Restless, she wandered from the elm
to the school-yard to smother an intensity
she could not squelch or simmer.
The wind swooned. Cement cracked. Deep into the underbelly
light traveled, no one in sight but his immense shadow,
and then a figure appeared out of the imagined dream
and matched it. So powerful, not for who he was
but for how her mind had magnified him
like a bug underneath cool glass,
every antenna and tentacle aquiver.
No sign of where she had been
or who she came from. Only knowledge
that it would never be re-created
except by this: putting words down on a page
and that she had forever compromised
the joy of summer for a dismal, endless winter.
And as the field of force gathered,
raping every last silvery bough,
tantalizing each limb,
she forgot even the feel of herself.
When it was over she felt moisture. Rain.

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dementordelta and I spent a totally indulgent Monday shopping for silly stuff and watching Due South -- do days get any better than that? We went to the mall in search of the Halloween store, but on the way in we stopped in Claire's, where we got owl earrings and bat sproingers and a penguin necklace and an elephant wallet among other things. Then we walked into Bath & Body Works to smell their wonderful new Twilight Woods lotion and discovered that all the candles were on sale. Then we stopped in The Icing, which had snake rings, and peeked in Brighton, which had owl keychains, before heading to Build-a-Bear, which was sadly out of witch outfits but had the little hats and shoes. Heading upstairs, we stopped in the Hallmark store (lots of bat items), Hot Topic (more Twilight merchandise than I can bear), and Yankee Candle (spiced pumpkin mmmmm) before we finally reached the Halloween store, at which point we were so hungry that we didn't try anything on before leaving for lunch!


Oh, and since we are twelve, we also bought giraffe friendship necklaces. Note for future reference: there are few angles less flattering in photos than smushed-together-for-phone-camera.

I was a very dull lunch date considering that I'm still not sure what I can safely eat out, so I had tuna and stole some of dementordelta's baklava while we watched some of my favorite dS episodes (sad with awesome soundtrack "Juliet is Bleeding" through awesome in every way "We Are the Eggmen"). Then she left to drive home, I had dinner and proofread Daniel's essay on the Doctor Who episode "Blink" which apparently they watched in English class to discuss rhetorical devices in horror movies, and we all watched Heroes, which continues to leave me completely unenthralled (and no Louise Fletcher this week makes it that much less exciting). We've been jerked around so many times, where one minute Sylar, Angela, Noah, et al are supposed to be sinister if not downright evil while they next we're supposed to feel sorry for them, and where Hiro goes from being a brilliant superhero to a feeble doofus and back, that I've really disconnected from caring about the characters. At least the Angels won!