Summer in Seattle
On a good day in Cal Anderson Park
you may see shining young bodies
stretched out soaking up the sun;
others active with ball games,
some crowding each others’ bikes at polo,
some in a circle with hula hoops,
or paired-off in circus gymnastics,
watched by a shirtless chap
with a cockatoo on his shoulder.
Others sleep, mess of homelessness
strewn about them, likely to stir
and ask for your small change.
Today I let my dog be petted
by a woman who once had a beagle
whose story took minutes to tell
and was told again to a passerby
with her Australian dog called Sheila.
We watched a guy camped on the steps
that lead to a blank stone wall with
waterworks machinery behind.
He was high on something, or
perhaps (she thinks) schizophrenic -
clowning desperately in rags
fewer and fewer. She offered
to bet - would he be naked or
not before five minutes were up?
I swore to be away in four,
but we were talking about
the whisky she was sipping
from a coke bottle, the shelter
she stays in since losing her house,
her hopes of a second go at rehab
down near Tacoma if they’ll have her back.
This Paterson she’d just whizzed through
from the Public Library. Me,
I was spoiled for bestsellers long ago,
by teaching Dickens and Jane Austen.
Really? Tell me the story of Pride
and Prejudice - would I like it?
Oh, I floundered, the father must find
men with money to marry his daughters…
When was this? - Eighteen hundred or so.
Before, she exclaimed, the Industrial
Revolution! that far back! It all seemed
a long way from our park with its folk
making do on very little. Maybe start,
I said, with a movie. Laurence Olivier?
She remembered him - Hollywood,
Lawrence of Arabia, he filmed all that.
I go that far back, she said, wistful:
I called my beagle Sherlock Holmes.
The stone cone has water on again
flowing from the top, a cool volcano,
into a pond we’re not allowed in.
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