Where I Wore It First | Where I'll Wear It Last

 I stole this directly from musesfool  (it's the poem she posted for today) but it's so awesome that I thought to myself, 'why wait until later to show this to my flist?'

Black Dress
~Laura Kasischke

I could go no further than that first line:
Spring comes even to the closet.
The words like little iron blossoms on a vine.

The parks full of people under a heathery sky.
The music of silverware, of violins.
Near the road, a woman paints
the pickets of her fence with blinding light.

When Herod sat down at the dinner table, the roasted
bird flew from the platter crying, "Christ lives! He is alive!"
It's spring, even at night.
The mushrooms damply reflect the stars.
All manner of pale flesh, opened up like eyes. Moonlight

on the jellyfish. In the dark
grass the startling muteness of a child's
white rubber rat.

But the closet. Even

in spring, the closet's a blind hive. A black dress

hangs at its center — like Persephone, it's

the closet's prisoner,
and its queen. Never forget,
it sings. I saw you then. I saw it all:

After the funeral, the riotous dance. After the wedding, the long

weeping and kneeling in the bathroom stall.

Oh, there are birds the world's
entirely forgotten (winter, amnesia) singing again
to the comings and the goings, the bright

and empty flashes,
the openings and closings. Sweetheart,
I'm leaving. Honey, I'm home. But that

black dress hangs always and omniscient in its single thought, its

accumulating mass — a darkness
tucked into another darkness:
where I wore it first,

where I'll wear it last.

Family Dynamics

I continually disbelief that Kahlan is the oldest sister in her family.

Seriously, I just does not compute for me.

I think because she has never seemed to have as much guilt and feel as much responsibility as I would have expected, given how Denee "died" (I'm referencing the pilot, fyi).

Also, Denee never looked younger, even when she was ( spoiler! )

Characterization: You're Either Doing It Wrong Or You're Lazy. Or Both.

 So I'm reading Coin Locker Babies (which I'm enjoying, especially once the model with the pet alligator shows up and the main characters go to Tokyo)* and it clarified thoughts I've been having since I dropped The Life Of The World To Come. Now, one of the reasons I dropped The Life Of The World To Come was that Kage Baker has forgotten that Mendoza is supposed to be the main character of this series. The other, and the one that is relevant to this post, is that Baker decided that to understand Mendoza's love interest, we needed to spent 3/4 of the book watching him grow up.

WRONG.

If the reader needs to follow the character in question through his primary and secondary schooling with in order for the adult character to make sense, the author is failing. **

An author should be able to write a character  who we understand at any point in their life (with a few select flashbacks). Dragging us through their whole childhood is both lazy and a waste of the readers time.

On that subject, I am sick of the childhood that the readers are dragged painfully through being a young boy's experience with the British school system. Even if the world in question is the future or has magic I am still BORED OUT OF MY MIND.

*not a spoiler, all this happens in the first 60 pages and is on the flap copy.

**Note that this excludes series or books where growing and going through school is the basic fabric of the story, a la the Harry Potter series or Maggie Quinn, Girl vs Evil.