Central Park

Now we see each other every day.
As if the buildings had forgiven us
for something done by others once here long ago.
Strangers, spectators, witnesses
and how shy we go round (and the dead going with us)
the Kennedy Onassis Reservoir where it’s still summer,
where we appear the same but different to each other in a park.
Late crossings on the Sundays of your small life.
Off of streets, without plan, north of Strawberry Fields.
“An artificial pastoral in the nineteenth-century
English romantic tradition.” Performance.
It’s still a surprise I keep finding life here.
What a person can have, where desire can sit;
how to have must be twice a verb—
it delivers, it makes calls. It won’t let the rest of us rest.
But we come for the sun and the cold rain regardless.
We live with the leaves that die fast
and the lamps that go late. If I do know one thing,
there’s more fiction around than true people.
Less beasts on their leashes than beasts of our kind.
At dusk, when I leave (which is something I’m good at)
the paths will refashion the way earth hunts time.
Many questions I’ve hurried through stay here;
unwanted, unasked for. The lawns keep your secrets.
The trees do retrieve us. It’s little like dying in fact.
And on the way out, if the park should become you—
this no one told me, this I forgot—
only because its own center escapes sight:
the statues, the wonderland.
Like us, it is seldom all there.