Finding the Lego
By Maryann Corbett
You find it when you’re tearing up your life,
trying to make some sense of the old messes,
moving dressers, peering under beds.
Almost lost in cat hair and in cobwebs,
in dust you vaguely know was once your skin,
it shows up, isolated, fragmentary.
A tidy little solid. Tractable.
Knobbed to be fitted in a lock-step pattern
with others. Plastic: red or blue or yellow.
Out of the dark, undamaged, there it is,
as bright and primary colored and foursquare
as the family with two parents and two children
who moved in twenty years ago in a dream.
It makes no allowances, concedes no failures,
admits no knowledge of a little girl
who glared through tears, rubbing her slapped cheek.
Rigidity is its essential trait.
Likely as not, you leave it where it was.
--------
Damp and cool early, turned lovely on Wednesday. It was a pretty uneventful day of photo scanning, walking, chatting with an overseas friend online, talking with a neighbor across the street, leftovers for lunch and dinner (Swedish meatballs and haroset for the latter, so it was really good leftovers). I had to edit something but otherwise very little got done, which is okay.
The Masked Singer was a clip show but it was still fun (no Jenny!) and a team with a woman won LEGO Masters (though I loved all the final builds) so that was good. And What We Do in the Shadows is back, with energy vampire musicals and ghost sex and so much ectoplasmic wrongness! Here we are visiting science museums in Connecticut and Baltimore in 1999: