The Park

It's not the smell of Lake Michigan.



It's a pond, in the middle of McKinley Park.
Some recreation office worker pours
thousands of fish into the muddy water
for families to catch on Sunday afternoons
in between soccer games and Mexican
barbacues.

It's warm tonight. 70 degrees. The whole
city has melted. We're outside again.


I walk by a house, a
pale yellow light illuminates the crib
of a baby.

Someone's beautiful baby. I
am overcome by the process
of man, the love and sex and
devotion and decite and pain
and reality and hummanity
all in one wooden crib from
a flea market, or Macy's,
or a relative's basement.

Maybe this baby is the next Jesus, King,
Marx, Malcolm X.

Maybe he is the next mechanic.

His brown skin is white, and pale,
and yellow, and red, and pink, and
raw and soft and alive.

I am alive, too.

Earlier I drank red wine in our court yard,
twenty or so raging youths blowing off steam
from work days , one new man for me to sing
an obnxious song from my childhood to,
wondering if he is interested in pressing his
lips against mine. In pressing his body against
mine in the room above our heads which
leads to the roof.
love and sex and
devotion and decite and pain
and reality and hummanity


I breathe out as I trip a stone in front
of the baby's window, the smell of the pond
seeping across the air.