Why does the Air Force need new bombers? Have the people we've been bombing been complaining?

I Married You

I married you
for all the wrong reasons,
charmed by your
dangerous family history,
by the innocent muscles, bulging
like hidden weapons
under your shirt,
by your naive ties, the colors
of painted scraps of sunset.

I was charmed too
by your assumptions
about me: my serenity—
that mirror waiting to be cracked,
my flashy acrobatics with knives
in the kitchen.
How wrong we both were
about each other,
and how happy we have been.


Linda Pastan
Queen of a Rainy Country
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Copyright © 2006 by Linda Pastan. All rights reserved.

Dark delights:  films noir

.

• Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944)
• Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang, 1945)
• Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945)
• Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947)
• Raw Deal (Anthony Mann, 1948)
• Pitfall (André de Toth, 1948)
• Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1949)
• Criss Cross (Robert Siodmak, 1949)
• The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950)
• In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950)
• Night and the City (Jules Dassin, 1950)
• The Narrow Margin (Richard Fleischer, 1952)
• On Dangerous Ground (Nicholas Ray, 1952)
• Pickup on South Street (Samuel Fuller, 1953)
• Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)

In my email today:

 

"Hi Phillipa, i do hope you find a moment to feel unencumbered by all the crap. Good to talk to you. My breast is healthy. Yay!

I called Katie today, not having heard from her in a while.  She was just getting home from having had a breast biopsy.  Shit!

Walked an hour and a half yesterday and am not uncomfortable today - yay! Will go out for a shorter amble before dark. 

 

My walk was in town.  It was odd to notice the changes in texture from one part of town to the next - sometimes subtle, some radical.  The first  few blocks were down a steepish hill - mixed residential and business.  Almost exactly as the street flattened out, the neighaborhood was poorer and dirtier.  The dirt intrests me because it was obvious that, still early-ish in the morning, the day's street cleaning had not yet been undone.  The dirt was more that of neglect - a not-so-vigilant city, absentee landlords, residents too caught up in keeping body and soul together to focus on maintaining the environs?  Maybe.

 

Along the way, a pigeon scored a direct hit on yours truly.  And people wonder why I always have baby wipes in my bag...