1972
Did you know that in
the summer of 1972
I ran the merry-go-round
in Springbank Park and
am really not too sure how
I did not run it right into the ground
or maybe even up on its side
and roll it into the river,
with its grinding gears and
pounding eight-track, the
thing relentlessly whirling,
gyrating from early morning
to the dark of night when I switched
on the lights
and if you came
with your young daughter just
before I started to roll the tarps
down, for sure I would let you ride
for free, there would be just the two
of you in the twilight damp, you
and she would be haloed there on
your horses, high in the merry-go-round
air, and me, resting there on the
guardrail chains below you,
every fourteen seconds,
waving back.
Poem about my concrete apartment building
facing the one my wife now lives in
and how we periodically meet in the expanse of parking lot
between us to exchange boxes, as if they were prisoners.
Boxes which soon emptied out onto counters, creating mounds
of things which were then ignored and almost thrown out
until I found it--what I had thought was a simple key ring
made from one of our dead niece’s memorial wrist bands
but, when I looked, discovered my wife had looped the
band through my wedding ring and, in this way, returned the ring to me.
Hard that it was almost an afterthought, without mention, just left there
in the bottom of a box, no envelope, nothing from her hand to mine.
The ring and the wrist band still are, and may always remain, intertwined
like this-- two tragedies, one more than the other
but, in the meantime, no warning to be aware, as put back together as you thought
you were, that there was still one thing left to break you, hidden in a box.
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