Maureen Hynes - christie pitts

…the colossal sadness at the end of summer
          – Gwendolyn McEwan, "The park, twenty years later"

You can walk the worn path on the park's rim,
a basin dug out of the city,
look down into all its secrets in plain view
– amazing that I could have gotten lost there as a child,
the cousins fled or preoccupied, me wandering
small and wailing in the bottom of the big empty bowl.
Twenty years of my own later, how different
were my young woman's tears as I sat one summer afternoon
on one of the benches watching my lover
leave his house on Crawford Street with a tea tray,
descend the hill towards me, carrying
the boiling news of his departure steadily in front of him.
Another man with a hundred plans –
Hawaii, Japan, Italy and Omemee:
how we give others the courage to leave us.

The park is studded with needles and condoms now,
Gwendolyn; they glint in the Maytime sun though
the swimming pool still splashes turquoise
under the new high slide. Sometimes I see
long strands of light like threads
above these public places, plunging down to lace
two lives together in pain or pleasure.
There is an erratic grace in the way the needle pulls
and catches and pierces the city's soft green fabric
two decades later again, when I lean back against the hill, prop
myself up on my elbows and pretend to watch a boy's softball team
with his mother. These are the places that stitch loss to desire;
the needle enters the body's memory, lodges there,
the park bears no trace.