This morning, Marg and Anthony stopped by and now my bed is in pieces in the garage waiting to be moved (it's going to my niece) and I'll be sleeping on the mattress (and boxspring) on the floor for the final couple of weekends we're in the house. I also have to remember to deauthorize my iTunes on this computer before it goes to my nephew. My brother has just taken my dad to get an iPhone so he can join the rest of us in the 21st century instead of having an old Palm phone that none of us knows how to work (including him sometimes).

I got my period last night so I'm just like, GO AWAY FROM ME NOW. (Last night it was more, COME AT ME BRO, but I managed not to pick a fight on the internet with people who were being factually wrong.)

Anyway, before all that, I did have time to pour out some Cap 2 meta on tumblr, and here it is, sans panel sets, so I can find it again:

#bucky barnes #is steve's dark mirror (tags via mooserrific)

This is why it's important that his name is in the title of the movie! All these people who are like, "there wasn't enough Winter Soldier in a movie titled 'Winter Soldier'" have COMPLETELY MISSED THE POINT. The title has multiple layers - there's the obvious textual one, that it's Bucky's name in the intelligence community, and there's the one that echoes back to the Winter Soldier Investigation during Vietnam - Steve is ALSO a Winter Soldier, in that he's standing up against crimes the US/SHIELD is committing. He's not the summer soldier and sunshine patriot, but a winter soldier, a man who stands up for what is right even when it's his own country committing the wrongs.

Then there's the fact that Steve is "not a perfect soldier but a good man" and therefore has the autonomy to question orders and stand up for what he believes in when he sees what Project Insight is, even before he knows HYDRA is involved. Whereas Bucky has been stripped of memory, personality, emotion, and any instinct towards self-preservation to be nothing but a weapon, a perfect soldier aimed where he's pointed, a foil to Steve in that the only way you get a perfect unquestioning soldier is to take away everything that makes him a person.

And then obviously there's the fact that the Steve/Bucky friendship is the EMOTIONAL CORE of the movie. Steve is flailing around, trying to make connections in the future - Natasha doesn't quite manage to play it right, not until that moment in Sam's apartment where Steve says now he'd trust her; Peggy flits in and out of lucidity; Steve doesn't trust Fury and Fury only barely trusts him because who else can he trust; Sharon isn't who she says she is when Steve meets her (and neither is half of SHIELD). The only person Steve connects with is Sam, and that connection and trust allows him to shore himself up when everything goes to shit with SHIELD and then when he tries to reconnect with Bucky.

Bucky, who also slept in the ice for 70 years, though not without interruption; Bucky, whose only connection comes through orders and dossiers and missions. Bucky, who'd already been tortured and experimented upon, and therefore survived the fall to be left in a state where he could be used by those who found him and turned into Hydra's new fist. The Winter Soldier is the super soldier Phillips wanted (strong, fast, always follows orders) but Erskine didn't; if Schmidt is what happens when an imperfect serum is given to an evil man (and the Hulk is what happens when you add gamma rays and give it to a man with breathtaking anger issues), the Winter Soldier is what happens when you take away any semblance of free will or personhood and all that's left is the weapon.

The weapon, who for the first time hesitates, who remembers, when suddenly called by name.

I HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS ABOUT STEVE AND BUCKY OKAY.

***

today's poem:

The Litany

This is a litany of lost things,
a canon of possessions dispossessed,
a photograph, an old address, a key.
It is a list of words to memorize
or to forget— of amo, amas, amat,
the conjugations of a dead tongue
in which the final sentence has been spoken.

This is the liturgy of rain,
falling on mountain, field, and ocean—
indifferent, anonymous, complete—
of water infinitesimally slow,
sifting through rock, pooling in darkness,
gathering in springs, then rising without our agency,
only to dissolve in mist or cloud or dew.

This is a prayer to unbelief,
to candles guttering and darkness undivided,
to incense drifting into emptiness.
It is the smile of a stone Madonna
and the silent fury of the consecrated wine,
a benediction on the death of a young god,
brave and beautiful, rotting on a tree.

This is a litany to earth and ashes,
to the dust of roads and vacant rooms,
to the fine silt circling in a shaft of sun,
settling indifferently on books and beds.
This is a prayer to praise what we become,
“Dust thou art, to dust thou shalt return.”
Savor its taste—the bitterness of earth and ashes.

This is a prayer, inchoate and unfinished,
for you, my love, my loss, my lesion,
a rosary of words to count out time’s
illusions, all the minutes, hours, days
the calendar compounds as if the past
existed somewhere—like an inheritance
still waiting to be claimed.

Until at last it is our litany, mon vieux,
my reader, my voyeur, as if the mist

steaming from the gorge, this pure paradox,
the shattered river rising as it falls—
splintering the light, swirling it skyward,
neither transparent nor opaque but luminous,
even as it vanishes—were not our life.

~Dana Gioia

***