Page 59 - The Woven Tale Press Vol. IV #9

Ode to Lake Merritt
I’ve orbited around its shore
of oak trees and water birds—
Canada Geese, Snowy Egret, piles of cracked mussel shell left by the Ring-Billed Gull
on rotting piers that collect algae
necklaces strung with corn chip wrappers
from the time I was a young mother pushing a stroller with my infant,
happy to sit on the lawn near
Children’s Fairyland, the spot Walt surveyed before going back to Southern California where he built his own child-sized park
with the notion it had to be scaled to size.
Puppet shows, popped corn scooped from carts. . . when my children got older
we visited a garden of monarch butterflies and pink worms buried in a compost heap
where they chewed strips of newspaper.
How long has it been since I had my first baby, my second as I kept walking laps
around the Lake watching them grow up
learning survival from firemen at the Festival, drop, roll, and cover, an urban fair that outgrew its own success, square dancing between vendors
where you and I ate black olives
and drank red wine, parked my car
by the colonnade in jogging shoes
and a windbreaker,
learned how to walk between benches after pneumonia made me glad to be alive
near trees whose trunks looked as if someone had wrung out their sheets and left them there to dry, run to catch a tea kettle whistling on the stove, gone to chase down news of a war ended, sprinting past swings, the sun a meniscus
floating on the water’s green shelf through the dripping of time.
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