Poem for Tuesday and Riverbend Waterfowl

Bufflehead Dawn
By William Hathaway

Like so many skunk kits,
trooping one-two-three-four across
a broad golf course, the imperceptible
glide of buffleheads down the center
of this morning’s wrinkled cove
seemed to charm wavelets
only moving as a glimmer and firs
still as ghosts that darkly stand and stare
in mirrors into a full scene more
than merely scenery. But skunks
are skunks and ducks are not,
and to say God lurks in details does not
say God’s more parts than sum
or that seeming should be an end-all
of being, but merely that this mind
this morning once saw a line
of small black skunks waddle to and fro,
white tails flouncing side to side,
along a green, and a charm
like a gift is to see again
both buffleheads and skunks,
now and then, seize this dawn
in simple black and white.

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And yet another quickie while "One Shining Moment" plays (every year we talk about how terrible it is and I end up watching it anyway). I didn't much care who won, though I was nominally rooting for North Carolina out of loyalty to the ACC, but Kansas came back spectacularly so it's all fine. Before that, we caught up on Sanditon (Charlotte YOU MUST BE ABLE TO SEE HOW AWFUL LENNOX IS) and before that, I had dinner with two friends whom I hadn't seen since before the Delta variant -- at the same place, the Silver Diner! 

During the late afternoon, Paul and I took a walk at Cabin John Park to see whether the bluebells there were blooming like the ones at Riverbend Park and near the canal lockhouses, which they were. The rest of the day was not exciting, being a Monday -- busy work, laundry, hunting for a complete file of the Grammy Awards Sondheim tribute all over the internet with no success. Here are some of the water birds we saw at Riverbend on Sunday -- grebes, buffleheads, geese, ducks, cormorants, and swallows diving into the pics.