Park Poems
Here is a sampling of some poems and photos just published in the journal Public, vol. 68, in a special issue on Making Worlds in the Pluriverse. Check out the journal or get in touch with us for more from the series.
photo by Dorit Naaman, 2020
Recreation Story
Wet land.
Can’t farm it.
Can’t live on it.
Can't get through it.
Or only sometimes, when the water is high, or frozen.
Waste land.
It isn’t empty.
There are grasses with sharp-edged leaves and weird knobbly roots
There are globs of goopy fish eggs
There are greasy eels sliding through it all.
Muskrats diving down into the muck,
Turtles slipping off logs out of the corner of your eye.
We can’t get to the bottom of it.
But maybe we can clean it up.
Or fill it up:
With the things we have used up
Or given up
Or broken up.
We pack it down —
We smooth it out.
After a while, it starts to look like something we recognize.
Something we can trim and tidy. Something with a shape.
We have reclaimed it, we say.
We have remade it.
We have remade it for recreation.
Our words know that the place has been claimed before.
Our words know that the place has been made before.
Our words know that the place has been created before.
But we don’t know what we are saying.
photo by Dorit Naaman, 2020
How Bad Is It?
I remember the Queen came one time and her railcar was parked right by our workshop down there, that’s where they stayed, on that club car train there. On site, not far from the clubhouse actually.
And I remember when they were pilin’ that garbage. They would pile so much garbage and then they would put earth over top of that, and soon as they’d go to put the earth down the rats’d start. Hundreds and hundreds of them come running outta there down on the golf course! We’d have carts runnin’ all over, whacking them with shovels. And then the water was high on the road that went down to Belle Park. The carp would all be comin’ up, and then they’d get caught in the shallow water and couldn’t get back... yup, we’d be whacking the shit out of them.
As a child, I’d travel with my dad to leave things amongst the fog of seagulls that inhabited the city dump.
It was vast.
The dump was mountains and mountains.
It was a pretty impressive thing to do.
And it felt like we were driving away, kind of even out of town.
It must have been December 1996.
We were in Kingston.
We had breakfast.
We went out to Belle Park, volunteers all of us, and we walked.
The leachate looked clear, pure, but we decided to take a 5-gallon bucket of water from it anyway, did the chain of custody, took the notes, capped it, took it to a lab.
They put the fish in, and the fish all died in five minutes.
We did it four more times, and the fish all died in five minutes every time.
These are the words of (in order) Garry Lavallee, retired greenskeeper at Belle Park, interviewed by Laura Murray and Scott Rutherford in July 2016; Bruce Downey, architect, interviewed by Laura Murray in June 2016; Mark Mattson, lawyer, interviewed by Laura Murray and Mary Louise Adams in May 2022.
photo by Dorit Naaman, 2023
Box Spring
In April we will have box spring.
The bladelets of grass will emerge,
And they will reach for the sky,
And they will be framed and teased by the coily rusty skeleton of a mattress
in beautiful formation around them.
*
Skeletons are more naked than naked.
You can’t recognize a person from their skeleton.
And you can’t sit on their lap.
But you can see what kept them together.
*
To be comfortable in life, it’s best to hide the inside and the underside.
Cover it, pad it, stitch it, keep the thick thread taut.
Don’t ask,
Who brought this box spring here?
Don’t ask,
Why?
Did they get a good sleep?
Where are they now?
Cover it, pad it, stitch it, keep the thick thread taut.