Poem for Sunday and Croydon Creek Nature Center

Big Game
By Brenda Shaughnessy

        —after Richard Brautigan's "A Candlelion Poem"

What began as wildfire ends up
on a candle wick. In reverse,
it is contained,

a lion head in a hunter's den.
Big Game.

Bigger than one I played
with matches and twigs and glass
in the shade.

When I was young, there was no sun
and I was afraid.

Now, in grownhood, I call the ghost
to my fragile table, my fleshy supper,
my tiny flame.

Not just any old, but THE ghost,
the last one I will be,

the future me,
finally the sharpest knife
in the drawer.

The pride is proud.
The crowd is loud, like garbage dumping

or how a brown bag ripping
sounds like a shout
that tells the town the house

is burning down.
Drowns out some small folded breath

of otherlife: O that of a lioness licking her cubs to sleep in a dream of
savage gold.

O that roaring, not yet and yet
and not yet dead.

So many fires start in my head.

--------

It was quite chilly but lovely out on Saturday. We had a quiet morning -- Daniel slept late, Adam worked on various projects -- and after lunch we went to Croydon Creek Nature Center, where we used to go more often when the kids were younger to hike and because it's just behind the Rockville climbing gym where they had several birthday parties when they were younger. This time Adam could not get a photo of the woodpecker he spotted but he was excited to find that Glenview Mansion, which is also on the property, had a portal for Google Ingress, so we walked around the mansion, where Daniel got to the portal first and claimed it, to Adam's annoyance.


This albino corn snake lives in the Croydon Creek Nature Center...


...as does this diamondback terrapin.


Here are my men on the rocks above the creek.


A little waterfall over a buried pipeline.


We saw two cardinals, a woodpecker, and many other birds.


We also saw several deer, though they trotted away as soon as they saw us.


Here are my kids in the nature center in 2006...


...and here they are by the same turtle tank today.

Fortunately we found another portal at Twinbrook Library so Adam could claim it. In the evening, Adam took his girlfriend to The Melting Pot for their one-year anniversary dating and Daniel went to his high school's robotics alumni dinner at a local Chinese buffet. Paul and I watched the sad end of the Maryland-UNC game, stopped at CVS and My Organic Market, watched most of the Notre Game game, then retrieved the kids. After that we put on last week's Merlin, which certainly isn't boring this season but I'm really frustrated with how the women are being written, which is ruining any fun I might be having with the ongoing slash-fest.