Saturday in CinCity. The Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax, of Cabbages and Kings Edition.

The end of a week off work, but the beginning week of spring quarter and the same projects I worked on through spring break, while I was working are ever present and still no closer to being approved by IRB. I'm beginning to think that department is managed by the Red Queen. The gist is, I don't feel refreshed and raring to go. I feel tired and thoroughly frustrated.

Hubby was kind enough to go on multiple mini-adventures with me during this cold and rainy week. We saw "Winston Churchill. Walking With Destiny."




And we saw the Cleopatra exhibit





and went to farmers' markets and shot some pool at a local neighborhood bar, but really what I did and where my mind kept drifting back to was my damned Finance class. As if finance as a subject is not hard enough, this one switched to being completely on-line and printing off the readings alone is enough to bankrupt a grrrl. And that's where I'm off to today. The library. For more reading. About finance in healthcare. Two words--ain't good.




Books

by Billie Collins


From the heart of this dark, evacuated campus
I can hear the library humming in the night,
a choir of authors murmuring inside their books
along the unlit, alphabetical shelves,
Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son,
each one stitched into his own private coat,
together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.

I picture a figure in the act of reading,
shoes on a desk, head tilted into the wind of a book,
a man in two worlds, holding the rope of his tie
as the suicide of lovers saturates a page,
or lighting a cigarette in the middle of a theorem.
He moves from paragraph to paragraph
as if touring a house of endless, paneled rooms.

I hear the voice of my mother reading to me
from a chair facing the bed, books about horses and dogs,
and inside her voice lie other distant sounds,
the horrors of a stable ablaze in the night,
a bark that is moving toward the brink of speech.

I watch myself building bookshelves in college,
walls within walls, as rain soaks New England,
or standing in a bookstore in a trench coat.

I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves,
straining in circles of light to find more light
until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs
that we follow across a page of fresh snow;

when evening is shadowing the forest
and small birds flutter down to consume the crumbs,
we have to listen hard to hear the voices
of the boy and his sister receding into the woods.



"The time has come, my little friends, to talk of other things
Of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings
And why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wigs
Calloo, Callay, come run away
With the cabbages and kings."