The state of the Chaz, ongoing. With added poetry.

[desperance]

He came. He saw. He removed the whole damn spout and took it away; came back with a replacement. (If I'd known he was going to do that, I might've thought of doing it myself. I assumed he would complicatedly open the thing up and replace an intimate washer. Still: it is the business of the wealthy man, etc. Tho' if US plumbers are anything like British ones, he's doing okay...)

Anyway. That happened, in the end. We have a working shower, and instructions on how not to abuse it. (He is amusingly forceful about the proper use of plumbing. Also incomprehensible, but hey. We get there in the end, with signs and demonstrations.)

Also, John came with a mercy delivery of coals and meats, so we should not go hungry tonight. (Also also, Mike offered his help and I turned him down immediately and without thought; apparently one of the social interactions that I'm really bad at is asking someone else to do a thing that I'm accustomed to do myself. Hunh. I might need to think about that.)

Anyway: pork is rubbed with fennel/spice mixture and on the grill in an indirect way, getting smoky. Chicken will follow soonish. Dough is mixed and yeast is rousing sleepily. M'neighbour Jerry is much amused that I am standing over the grill on the hottest afternoon of the year. Mike is making notes on the California Ale (which is not a beer, alas, but a Morris moot).

I appear to have missed lunch, and it's too late now. No matter. It's the hottest afternoon of the year, and I am grilling; this entitles me to drink cold beer soon, if not immediately.

Meanwhile, in a careless moment I confessed to sovay that I had written a poem, an epithalamion for m'friends Mark and Helen (who met on an eclipse-chasing holiday). I can't remember if I ever posted it here; if not, here it is. If yes, here it is again.


ECLIPSE

by John Mark Linden (I didn't want them to know I'd written it, as the day was so much not meant to be about me; so I hid it behind a pseud)


An eclipse is sheltering,
the shadow of another body
between you and a hard sun.

Lovers eclipse one another
wilfully
standing in each other’s light

and in that timeless twilight
no birds sing
so they can hear the beat of each other’s blood against the silence.

And is it any wonder
then
that we should chase eclipses of our own

to snatch a taste of it
and feel obscurely threatened by the size of it
the rush of it

the moon’s shadow and how we run to stand within it
at that place, that time
that angle to the sun?

And it’s not about the sun
though we pretend with pinhole cameras
pinhole sentiments

it’s about what comes between the sun and us
graceful, monumental, undelayed
the urgency of moment

and it trails its shadow like a disregarded veil
that falls across us because we have run to be there
but it’s not about the shadow, nor the light.

It’s about us, as it always is, our bodies in their perilous orbits
and how we chase that touch of perfect balance
eye to eye

lit only by each other.
It’s all about eclipses, in the end.
Lovers have always known this. We can learn.

Comments

[movingfinger]

Ever since something from the plumbing sheared off in my hand, as I was doing one of those simple I-can-do-it-myself repairs around the house, instead of neatly unscrewing, I have called the plumber for even these little jobs. Because (cheap) old metal + mineral deposits = grief.