Poem for Sunday, Baltimore Aquarium, Doctor Who

Gold River Neck Riddle
By Catie Rosemurgy

What is red and singing on the inside, gray and moaning on the outside?
(The opera house)

What is green, damp, and stuck between the forest's teeth?
(The doctor)

What drags on the floor and catches fire?
What reveals the girl's legs while destroying them?
(The afternoon sun)

What grows tall, blocks the sun, loses everything,
and still darkens the field? (The young man
looking for the idiot boy.)

What spreads out by simplifying further?

What (smoke) was here?
What (government)?

What saves and ruins?
(The museum)

What blooms amongst the rocks?
(A ship)

What opens wide and explains why?
(A burning window)

What is ill-advised in the new world?
(What ends at the treeline.
What split like a lip into two less viable possibilities.)

What shimmers on our bodies when we are warm?
(Our historic burning) What lines both the inside of our coats
and the inside of our mouths?
(Our current burning)
What is the real museum?
What is wet and is yet a wick?
(The tongue, which becomes colorless over time.
Which flakes.)

What is the souvenir we bring home from the flood?
(Our hair)

On what bent and drinking animal are we the pattern?
(The land)
(The river)
(The narrow) The trees
were some stony being's fingers.
We walked easily between them to the wet edge of its face.

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We spent most of Saturday with my mother and my sister's family, with whom we went to Baltimore to the National Aquarium and had lunch. The aquarium was very crowded -- the fact that it rained all day probably contributed to that -- but we had good seats for the dolphin show and we got to see the golden lion tamarins, the sloth, the giant Amazon catfish and other animals that are sometimes hiding when we're there:

















Everyone got hungry at different times so lunch began erratically, with one of Nicole's daughters going with her to one place and the others going to another with Harris while we thought we were meeting at the Hard Rock Cafe, but the latter had a long wait even at nearly 3 p.m. and we ended up at Chipotle, which my immediate family and my sister all liked a lot. In the evening we went back to my parents' for leftovers and birthday cake for Paul.

We've just spent the past couple of hours watching Doctor Who's "The Time Warrior" -- first time I've seen Pertwee, who's delightful particularly with Sarah Jane Smith putting him in her place when she thinks he's being sexist, and we howled at the cheesy version of medieval history which reminded us more of Blackadder than anything outside a Renfaire. Now we're watching the documentary "Beginning the End" and wishing we had more Pertwee!