In the Park by John Koethe
This is
the life I wanted, and could never see.
For almost
twenty years I thought that it was enough:
That real
happiness was either unreal, or lost, or endless,
And that
remembrance was as close to it as I could ever come.
And I
believed that deep in the past, buried in my heart
Beyond the
depth of sight, there was a kingdom of peace.
And so I
never imagined that when peace would finally come
It would
be on a summer evening, a few blocks away from home
In a small
suburban park, with some children playing aimlessly
In an
endless light, and a lake shining in the distance.
Eventually,
sometime around the middle of your life,
There’s a
moment when the first imagination begins to wane.
The future
that had always seemed so limitless dissolves,
And the
dreams that used to seem so real float up and fade.
The years
accumulate; but they start to take on a mild,
Human tone
beyond imagination, like the sound the heart makes
Pouring
into the past its hymns of adoration and regret.
And then
gradually the moments quicken into life,
Vibrant
with possibility, sovereign, dense, serene;
And then
the park is empty and the years are still.
I think
the saddest memory is of a kind of light,
A kind of
twilight, that seemed to permeate the air
For a few
years after I’d grown up and gone away from home.
It was
limitless and free. And of course I was going to change,
But
freedom means that only aspects ever really change,
And that
as the past recedes and the future floats away
You turn
into what you are. And so I stayed basically the same
As what
I’d always been, while the blond light in the trees
Became
part of my memory, and my voice took on the accents
Of a mind
infatuated with the rhetoric of farewell.
And now
that disembodied grief has gone away.
It was a
flickering, literary kind of sadness,
The
suspension of a life between two other lives
Of
continual remembrance, between two worlds
In which
there’s too much solitude, too much disdain.
But the
sadness that I felt was real sadness,
And this
elation now a real tremor as the deepening
Shadows
lengthen upon the lake. This calm is real,
But how
much of the real past can it absorb?
How far
into the future can this peace extend?
I love the
way the light falls over the suburbs
Late on
these summer evenings, as the buried minds
Stir in
their graves, the hearts swell in the warm earth
And the
soul settles from the air into its human home.
This is
where the prodigal began, and now his day is ending
In a great
dream of contentment, where all night long
The
children sleep within tomorrow’s peaceful arms
And the
past is still, and suddenly we turn around and smile
At the
memory of a vast, inchoate dream of happiness,
Now that
we know that none of it is ever going to be.
Don’t you
remember how free the future seemed
When it
was all imagination? It was a beautiful park
Where the
sky was a page of water, and when we looked up,
There were
our own faces, shimmering in the clear air.
And I know
that this life is the only real form of happiness,
But
sometimes in its midst I can hear the dense, stifled sob
Of the
unreal one we might have known, and when that ends
And my
eyes are filled with tears, time seems to have stopped
And we are
alone in the park where it is almost twenty years ago
And the
future is still an immense, open dream.
