Mardi Gras Lost

I fully intended to write a blog post for Fat Tuesday, since Fat Tuesday is an actual category here in my blog, one of the "eight days a week" on which I am (supposed to be) writing. Since I am not, and since I missed Mardi Gras, it is instead a Slattern Day...and, I suspect, will turn out to be a Random Coinciday and a Poetry Someday.

Indeed, I notice this random coincidence in my current reading: a cormorant, a kind of black and white aquatic bird. Satan, a shape shifter, sits in the Tree of Life as a cormorant to observe Paradise in Book IV of Paradise Lost, by John Milton. That was a surprise,* as we usually picture him as a serpent. Perhaps that's in Book V. So far, he has also sat "[s]quat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve," trying to invade her dreams. He is surely up to no good.

*a surprise, even though I have read this book before...but it was decades ago, in college... Now I am re-reading it for a Zoom book group.

But, back to the coincidence. I am also reading The Colour, by Rose Tremain, about gold** digging in New Zealand, and on p. 212, in the point of view of the character Pare, is this: "She heard a cormorant shrieking in her dreams." I hardly ever read about cormorants, but here are two in the same week. Plus, the bad dreams...

I didn't even eat a devilish sweet on Mardi Gras. Instead I am eating Harry & David pears,** a naturally sweet gift from my son and his girlfriend for my recent birthday. The pears, ripening gradually, are so delicious! Ah, perhaps they will make their way, plum-like, into a poem soon, as I am writing a poem a day, for Lent, with 40 Days, 40 Writes.

**One was wrapped in gold!

And I did submit some poems, by the deadline, yesterday, to a magazine I admire. Yesterday was also the "deadline," as in "best by" date, on that blueberry goat cheese sitting in the fridge since Christmas, slattern that I am. Why? I loved that cheese! Why didn't I eat it on time? I had my reasons, but still. And, hey, it's cheese, it's probably still good, but also probably not something I want to take a chance on. Sigh...

So here, instead of blueberry goat cheese, is a beautiful cormorant, by JJ Harrison, thanks to Wikipedia. See that random coincidence of the serpentine neck?!