Poem for Sunday: Golden Gate Park

by Lottie Kent


Today I was sulky and excellent:

  after an evening argument

I walked to Elk Glen Lake,

  for the third time to see

that fragile green gob of water.

 

With my limbs spilt over a bench, I let my lower lip jut

  like a soft pink shelf

 - the filigree veins showing stubborn and sable -

  as if it were a bulbous looking glass

 for the black buckthorn overhead.

 

In the Japanese Tea Gardens

 the thickening, reddish light

was mottling the slow pond

 like carmined spittle from a dying sun

that once burnt gold.

            (But now just lights the Dutchman’s Pipe

as the day’s wrinkles deepen.)

 

It reminded me: I’ve lived a while now,

 and my own river-blood has borne

the crimson pulp of revolving leaves,

 for years, through mountain mouths

(Semilunar valves)

 

down under that artery-red Bridge

down into the heart’s sweating valley.

 

  But in that cleavage

where the Redwood leaves have fallen

- waltzed whetted and cold -

onto the water’s shifting skin to quietly

  clot       

into a soft uvula -

 

will it not all one day stop?

Life’s a sanguine cadence,

interrupted. 

 

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