Washington Park

I ran across this poem by Gerald Costanzo the other day and it made me long for the Pacific Northwest. I grew up just outside of Portland, but my dad lived there and we would often go to Washington Park. We walked the train tracks between the park and the zoo, jumping out to scare the train goers. We would read the names and dates of all the Queens of Rosaria. In 2011, I took my family and we spent an afternoon in the park. I realized again how beautiful it is.

Washington Park

I went walking in the Rose Gardens.
It was about to rain, but the roses
were beginning to bloom. The Olympiads,

some Shreveports, and the Royal
Sunsets. This was in the beautiful
city I had taken away from myself

years before, and now I was giving it back.
I walked over the Rosaria tiles
and found Queen Joan of 1945. I sat

on the hillside overlooking the reservoir
and studied the Willamette and the Douglas
firs. I learned the traffic

and the new highrises as the rain
came down.

                    This leaving and returning,

years of anger and forgiveness,
the attempts to forgive one’s self—
it’s everybody’s story,

and I was sitting there
filling up again with the part of it
that was mine.

—Gerald Costanzo, from Nobody Lives on Arthur Godfrey Boulevard, Rochester NY: BOA Editions, Ltd., 1992. [chapter 9]

Waking Up

Why is waking up so hard to do,
When the day is work and not play,
And the bed is warm and
The room is cold?
Why is the alarm hard to hear
And the sleep so deep?
But on Saturday, O for shame!
My eyes open and thoughts begin
It’s too early, why can’t I sleep in?

—Anonymous

Crawling Around the Cathedral Floor

“I am convinced that poets are toddlers in a cathedral, slobbering on wooden blocks and piling them up in the light of the stained glass. We can hardly make anything beautiful that wasn’t beautiful in the first place. We aren’t writers, but gleeful rearrangers of words whose meanings we can’t begin to know. When we manage to make something pretty, it’s only so because we are ourselves a flourish on a greater canvas. That means there’s no end to the discovery. We may crawl around the cathedral floor for ages before we grow up enough to reach the doorknob and walk outside into a garden of delights. Beyond that, the city, then the rolling hills, then the sea. And when the world of every cell has been limned and painted and sung, we lie back on the grass, satisfied that our work is done. Then, of course, the sun sets and we see above us the dark dome of glittering stars.”

—Andrew Peterson, read his whole post here.