It showed your place of birth and all the colors blurred like chalk on a blackboard

It seems I just don't sleep anymore, which is great heading into Readercon.

Yesterday was a wash. I walked around a little. I lay around a lot. I spent most of the evening working on a translation of Abraham Sutzkever's "The Lead Plates from Romm's Printing House" ("די בלײַענע פּלאַטן פֿון ראָמס דרוקערײַ") because I knew the first verse from memory and could not remember if I had ever read the rest in the original Yiddish; the answer turned out to be no. I did a kind of work-print translation for spatch and then a slightly less chunky one for selkie who introduced me to this poem in the first place in 2003, when it provided a chapter heading and eventually the title of her first novel A Verse from Babylon (2005). And then I did this.

( You found a story for yourself, built from a dream. )

The thing about Sutzkever is that he is not one of my favorite poets of this particular war. I respect him for being a staunch Yiddishist in Israel until his death in 2010, but would it have been so terrible not to have lost Hirsh Glik? Or damn near all the rest of Yung-Vilne? I like this poem and I can't even tell if the thing I like best about it is present as strongly as it feels to me. Sutzkever is writing ploughshares into swords, dreamers into soldiers, the melting down of millennia of studious tradition into violent action—like those Jewish warrior-exemplars the Maccabees—but because the thoughts and the dreams and the tradition remain still in the lead, it feels to me like fighting with stories as much as with guns.

For obvious reasons I think that's important.

Oh, my God, we're on the beach

spatch met me after my doctor's appointment and took me to the sea.

I had just planned to eat my traditional bagel for dinner and then come home and work. Instead we went to Salem on the commuter train. There was even one standing obligingly at North Station, just waiting for us to purchase tickets and rush aboard with two minutes to spare. We had cans of seltzer and a glazed yeast donut to share between us; by sheer luck I had taken my camera with me when I left the house this afternoon and I spent the next forty-five minutes taking pictures through the faintly tinted acrylic glass of the Zakim from the other side of its white cable-stays, the inside of the Tonka-truck-colored drawbridge that we watch so often from North Point Park, the sand and gravel heaps close enough to read their labels, industry of scrap metal and wind turbines on the shores of the Mystic River, empty-eyed brick buildings alive with graffiti, springing-green salt marshes marched across with electricity pylons and driftwood-pale piers. I got a wonderful view of the parking garage at Lynn, all slant concrete parallels frosted with pastel-blue steel like something out of Tati's Playtime (1967). We walked two blocks from the station in Salem and were greeted by a UCC church whose granite steps—the cornerstone said 1923—were home to a queer rainbow of doors, red through violet under the open and affirming banner that clearly no one had felt strongly about taking down after Pride. We passed two crosswalks painted in rainbow colors ditto. And we had talked about finding a clam shack out on the point where we had once seen children's Shakepeare, but Rob's knee was not yet recovered for that kind of walking; we roamed around the waterfront where the sea was the same steeped blue as the sky and ended up at Longboards, which is famous for its pizza. I was there for the sea; I got a lobster roll. It was an excellent lobster roll, easily more than two claws' worth of meat on a griddled roll with just a little butter and lemon and the traditional essentially decorative lettuce leaf. We did not really have room for dessert, but we bought a bag of bananas foster popcorn from their neighbor store Popped! and noshed as we wandered on. The Friendship of Salem was not in evidence at Derby Wharf, although its masts and rigging were. We did not go inside, but we walked past the House of the Seven Gables, where Hawthorne gave one of his characters the death that belonged to an ancestor of my husband's. (I wrote a poem about it.) I complimented the mermaid necklace of a young man we passed on Turner Street and a man smoking on the steps of the VFW complimented my hair. We found a courtyard full of incredible junk that turns out to be Herb Mackey's Metal Sculpture Yard. At the ferry we turned back, because we'd missed the last one to Boston by ten or fifteen minutes, and I think I dozed most of the way back on the train. The Orange Line was not even terrible for getting home. I suspect we have spent all of our transit luck for the summer and I will end up hitch-hiking to Readercon on Thursday or something equally ridiculous. It was worth it. See evidence below: I had the sea.

( Just as you pictured perfectly. )