Day in the Park


Hecksher Park tulips

Met my friend Stefanie and her kids for pizza and a few hours in Hecksher Park today. It was a truly gorgeous afternoon, blue skies and temps in the mid sixties. The park is an oasis of tulips, and in fact next week will be hosting a tulip festival. Stef had some poetry books with her she had just bought at the Book Revue, and we leafed through them and talked poetry and manuscript publishing on a bench in the sun while the kids took turns burying each other in a sandbox. Out of the blue a woman approached me and said, "Mary Jane?" I didn't recognize her at first, but it it turned out to be my old assistant editor at Beauty Fashion magazine, Andrea. She has two kids now too and lives with her husband in nearby Woodbury. I hadn't seen her in about 12 years. Oddly, I had had a Beauty Fashion nightmare last night which I had been discussing with Johanna just before leaving for the park. Life is very strange. Beauty Fashion was a hideous place to work and I have a recurring nightmare that I am back in the office, and don't know how it is I have come to work there again. Usually I am responsible in the dream for several publications and there is nothing stored in my computer in the way of articles. Doom in the form of the psycho publisher is just around the corner from my cubicle. Johanna has similar nightmares.


The Tulip Bed


The May sun--whom
all things imitate--
that glues small leaves to
the wooden trees
shone from the sky
through blue gauze clouds
upon the ground.
Under the leafy trees
where the suburban streets
lay crossed,
with houses on each corner,
tangled shadows had begun
to join
the roadway and the lawns.
With excellent precision
the tulip bed
inside the iron fence
upreared its gaudy
yellow, white and red,
rimmed round with grass,
reposedly.

William Carlos Williams