Mother
By Herman de Coninck
Translated by Kurt Brown and Laure-Anne Bosselaar
What you do with time
is what a grandmother clock
does with it: strike twelve
and take its time doing it.
You’re the clock: time passes,
you remain. And wait.
Waiting is what happens to
a snow-covered garden,
a trunk under moss,
hope for better times
in the nineteenth century,
or words in a poem.
For poetry is about letting things
grow moldy together, like grapes
turning into wine, reality into preserves,
and hoarding words
in the cellar of yourself.
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Thursday was nearly as rainy as Wednesday. I spent the morning having Issues burning backup discs (apparently there is a maximum number of files a DVD can hold regardless of the size of the files, or at least there is in the programs I use). In the afternoon I took a brief walk and took younger son along with his friend to Hot Topic to get pink hair dye for Halloween. His hair is so dark that it's only moderately pink, but that may be just as well when it comes time to wash it out.
Son wanted to go to his high school's Got Talent show in the evening, so we had dinner early, then I watched DS9's "A Man Alone" to review -- an episode I think I only saw when it originally aired. I love Odo almost as much as I love Kira. Then we watched the World Series, which has seemed endless, I suppose because I don't passionately care who wins! Here are some photos from Riley's Lock last weekend, both the C&O Canal and the view across the Potomac River toward a Virginia golf course:
