And For All This

At the park, spring touches grass, daffodils, people. In the cool evening, two young women sit with a baby beneath a tree. In front of them, two young men throw a football back and forth as the yellow lamps flick to life. The four are making plans of some sort. One offers an objection. The other counters, "That isn't anything. You smoke weed every day." The words aren't angry, only designed to carry across the awakening grass under the tree in the quiet evening air. As one whose sins trail more privately behind her, I'm mildly astonished as I crunch past them on the red chip path.

Someone ditched a park bench in the pond right in front of my thinking spot. One green end juts above the water; the rest dips into the murk, like a shipwreck. The water is gray with overcast evening. A gray heron with a white slash on his face waits in the shallows. "There lives the dearest freshness deep down things," I comfort myself. I call my sister. We speak of idealism and control and freedom and love, and Jacob wrestling. The heron, at last, makes his catch. Ripples pen the trees' black shadows into curl lines. Porch lamps reflect between the boles like elven fires.

I walk home in a hint of rain. The landlords have hung lights in colored bottles from the trellis: purple, blue, and green.