{ yesterday's tweets. }

• 09:06 LoudTwitter is delivering again. So what was with the snafu? (Self = back to spreadsheets) #
• 10:22 Spreadsheet = finished! #
• 16:03 Mary's boyfriend in In Plain Sight actually says "aie, aie, aie". !!! #
• 19:43 "Mulder, toads just fell from the sky!" "I guess their parachutes didn't open." ♥ #
• 21:04 FOR YOUR INFORMATION THE SQUEAKING THINGS ARE BACK WTF WTF WTF #

{ Siân Hughes: The Send-Off. }

The Send-Off
by Siân Hughes

Mummy has to go now. Sorry we were late.
I brought you a flower. No, it’s dead.

When you cut them, you see, they die.
The petals were white when I left.

I was sewing your name tags.
This is your name. I know it’s no use to you now.

Home clothes are not allowed. It’s the rules.
Your shawl is taped to your parcel.

Don’t be afraid. You are not alone,
and no one has a bed with a window.

The man with the spade brings you in
from the rain. The one in black says words.

In a few weeks they’ll come back
and let in more new friends.

The view changes each time. The sky,
believe me, is not always this cold.

When I was a little girl like you
I liked to look through the banisters

and see who was calling so late.
My parents in their fancy clothes

might turn and say “Who’s out of bed?”
The visitors blew kisses. Sometimes

they saved me something special
that the grown-ups had to eat.

My darling, sleep well in your bed.
Don’t come out on the landing where it’s cold

because, you see, I won’t come home
in my long dress and necklace

and blow you kisses up the stairs.
I won’t carry you back to bed

to rub your blue feet better
or fetch blankets from the box.

No, you don’t need a bottle, cuddle,
special rabbit, teddy, bit of cloth.

You don’t even need to close your eyes.
They were born that way, sealed shut.

You are a hard lesson to learn,
soft though you are, and transparent.

There’s a mark on your forehead –
the simple flaw that separates
the living from the dead.

It looks like I dropped you downstairs.
I didn’t. I promise. It was like this:

somebody did some counting
and when they added you up

they found one part of you didn’t match.
It’s supposed to come out even.

They call it trisomy twenty-one.
It’s not such a lucky number.

No, I know it doesn’t begin to explain
your lack of Christmas presents

or the colour of your skin. I know
the best smiles in the world come out uneven.

--

Siân Hughes won the 2006 Arvon International Poetry Competition with this poem.

{ Nichita Stanescu: Sentimental Story. }

Sentimental story
Nichita Stanescu

Then we met more often.
I stood at one side of the hour,
you at the other,
like two handles of an amphora.
Only the words flew between us,
back and forth.
You could almost see their swirling,
and suddenly,
I would lower a knee,
and touch my elbow to the ground
to look at the grass, bent
by the falling of some word,
as though by the paw of a lion in flight.
The words spun between us,
back and forth,
and the more I loved you, the more
they continued, this whirl almost seen,
the structure of matter, the beginnings of things.

 

{ Leah Goldberg: The Shortest Journey. }

The Shortest Journey
by Leah Goldberg (trans. Annie Kantar)

1. Tel Aviv, 1935

The flagpoles on the roofs of homes
were like the masts of Columbus's ship
and each crow that perched on them
conjured another continent.

Travellers' knapsacks walked through the streets
and the language of a foreign land
was thrust like the cold blade of a knife
into the hot desert wind.

How did the air of that small city
find a way to bear
memories of childhood, lovers shed,
rooms emptied somewhere?

Like pictures blackening inside a camera,
clear winter nights were reversed,
with rainy summers across the sea,
and foggy mornings of capital cities.

As the sound of marching behind your back
drums a foreign army's songs,
it seems, as you turn your head to the sea,
your city's church is floating.

( continued. )

[Saving Grace.] 2x02 (spoilers)

This week's episode continued the show's trend of establishing community within Grace's life. Often I'd watch a show like this and seriously question how truthful a portrayal it is to suggest that everyone should know Grace and be willing to extend themselves for her, but I think this show has that cop dynamic nailed. And Grace is loved, which probably goes a long way to explaining why she can stick at her job but not her life.

Three things happen this week. (1) The son of a man whose body Grace found after the OK City bombings goes missing and is involved in a girl's disappearance. Grace, naturally, is connected to the boy through his father's death. The episode title, as always, comes from a line of dialogue: a survivor lives here. Grace says this whilst appraising the boy's apartment. Long plot shot, the boy used his father's money to score some coke, which his girlfriend, an athlete (rowing) destined for great things (the Olympics, apparently) strongly objected. She followed him out to his deal, and crashed her car on the way back. The boy ends up doing prison time, but Grace assures his mother (with whom Grace is now friends) that he can get his life back. The girl, presumably, lives. 

Holly Hunter as Grace Hanadarko

The relationship between Grace and the boy's mother touches on the scope of Grace's heart: that she can be so, so kind and steady to strangers, but she doesn't afford herself that same kindness. The case also put forward the fact that Grace is such a great cop, and she's so dedicated to her work. In the course of working the case, she gets the boy to quote what I feel is almost a directive for her (see below).

(2) Ham Dewey has left his wife. We find this out at the beginning of the episode in a typically carnal scene, involving a lot of food. Later in the episode Grace opens her drawer to find it stuffed with bottles of mustard and ketchup. Even later in the episode, Grace opens Ham's glovebox to have party coils spring out at her. Such is the relationship. Ham is very aware that Grace is unable to commit to him, but now, at least, the relationship is cleaner. He has his own place; he quietly takes the numbers of divorce lawyers from the lt. (in a great scene which reveals that she's twice divorced, heh). Ham has Grace's back throughout the episode, and Butch lingers there, too, peripherally. This is not Butch's episode, naturally. There's one excellent, excellent scene where Grace goes out to have a cigarette and takes a bag of ashes out with her - they're the ashes of the first female detective in major case! ("Verna liked to smoke, so sometimes Grace takes her.")

In their partnered pairs, the team recounts who they lost at the bombing. Ham reveals he lost about 16 friends; Grace, of course, lost her sister, Mary Francis (more on this shortly). Rhetta feels out of the loop because she doesn't know the family that Grace is trying to help this week; she was pregnant with her eldest child at the time and unable to help anyone. Butch lost a couple of friends; he arrived on the scene 6 minutes after the bombing. Bobby was at home, arguing with his wife, late for a meeting at the very building that got blown up. This is what I mean by a sense of community. The bombings shook OK City, but these people, so close to it in this cop community, for them the bombing hit every single one of them in one way or another. And the show gets that right.

And finally, (3) Clay takes Gus(man) out for a walk, and he goes missing. This seems like a gimmick plot sometimes but is just. Really it's not about Gusman. It's about Grace and Clay, her nephew, and the continuation of the impact of Mary Francis' death on Grace. I think this is the big plot this year. If last year was leading up to the abuse reveal, then this year is taking care of Grace's guilt and pain over the second biggest pain in her life: the death of her sister, and the part she feels she played in it. 

Clay finds out that Grace was absent the day before the bombings (which is why Mary Francis ended up being at the building, trying to get social security sorted for her son) and in his grief over losing the dog, he gets annoyed at Grace, which Rhetta has to bear witness to. Rhetta defends Grace because she knows, as do we (I hope), that no-one blames themselves more than Grace does. Clay, thankfully, calms down and forgives Grace: the bombing wasn't her fault, and he lets her know that he knows this. 

Whilst looking for Gusman, Rhetta meets Earl again, but she finds that the more she tries to recall him, the less she is able to, which explains why she doesn't realise that he's the man who bought Holy Cow from her last year. 

Looking for Gusman is a beautiful story. Grace's sense of loss over the dog is enormous, and she immediately goes out to look for him and put up missing flyers. The lt. puts out a bolo on the dog, and a local patrol cop helps out (wonderfully Grace psychs the guy by pretending he's run over her foot; he answers by using the car's phone system: "Grace Hanadarko, yo' mom's looking for you!") Even when Grace is at her wit's end with the case, her team is asking her if she's heard anything about Gus, if she's okay, if she needs some help looking for him. 

Very little Earl about this week, though he feels strongly for Grace. He tells her that Grace has to ask God for the god, and he watches over her, but he can't help her grief. The dog only comes back once Grace is brave enough to stop feeling sorry for herself, stop being angry at Clay (which she is only temporarily), and admits to Clay why she wasn't there the day before the bombing to babysit him. 

--

Other points:

* The Lt. is still all over Texans because of football, lols. "No surprise in Austin they know all about cheating." Butch gives her this great look over that one.

* Rhetta is so amazing. She drives up onto the sidewalk in front of Grace, and even Grace has to smile.

* Both Ham and Butch are playing with half-sized footballs in the conference room (wtf?)

* Grace just wants to save that girl. This is the great thing about Gracie: her priority is the victim, then the perp. Victims first, always. And the fact that she kept in touch with this boy at all is just... it shows that there's so much to her that the people around her don't always get to see. (Her family, for instance.)

* The emblem on the wall - the graffiti - is almost like a charge against Grace. We know that the bombing is a huge motivating factor in her life, both as a cop and as a survivor (she, unlike her mother and sister, didn't retrieve anything from the bomb site. Her grief and her guilt are enormous). I don't know. Maybe that's what makes her so good at her job?

                      

the grafitti

Team 5
4-19-95
We search for the truth.
We seek Justice.
The Courts Require it.
The Victims Cry for it.
And GOD Demands it!

* The trick glovebox is a lovely moment between Ham and Grace: "I know what we are and what we ain't." I like that even though Ham obviously loves Grace so, so much, this is autonomy for him. He's finally breaking out of that miserable marriage to Darlene.

* Grace smacks Earl sharp on the jowls. The violence of her grief, and the brutality of it - that she continues to beat on Earl... sometimes Grace makes me speechless. I want my dog. I WANT MY DOG. She's so childlike sometimes. It's like some part of her is still that child that was violated. Not just the tricks she plays, but her anger at the world, and the way she messes with responsibility. There is something of innocence to this woman - that she can't ever grow up because something of her was stolen. It's remarkable. And the way she acts, sometimes, that too can take your breath away. 

* You know, if you were missing, I'd keep looking till I found you. Grace's love for Clay, and finally sympathy, and the kindness he needed to hear before, when she tells him that he's not to blame. And then is so, so brave, to let him ask about the things she fears. "I hear the kids at school have been talking about me?" Oh, Grace.

--

These episodes go so quickly, aie. Suffice it to say: another great episode, and I can't wait for the next one!

 

{ Leah Goldberg: Forgiveness. }

Forgiveness
by Leah Goldberg

You came to me, to open my eyes.
To me your body was a view,
A window and a mirror.
You came as night comes to the owl
To show him, in the darkness, all things.

And I learned: There's a name
For each eyelash and fingernail,
And for every hair on the exposed flesh.
And the scent of childhood,
The scent of paste and pine,
Is the night aroma of the body.

If there were torments -
They've sailed towards you.
My white sail into your darkness.
Allow me to go, oh allow me to go
And kneel on the shore of forgiveness.

--

For noorie, for whom this is a favourite. (And thus endeth tonight's poetry spam.)