Showing posts with label Tacoma Schiller aging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tacoma Schiller aging. Show all posts

Monday, September 20, 2021

Wright Park

In Tacoma the old man
crossing Wright Park
will not use a path
and ignores the statue

of Schiller, a German
poet who never visited
Tacoma--his loss. I can't

find a verb to say what 
the old man does as he 
goes up the slope
to the conservatory. It is

his own peculiar old
white-haired way of walking,
wearing a blue windbreaker
on a hot afternoon. Perfect

verbs and muscular 
buttocks belong to the young.
A woman in orange shoes
floats past him. Her profile

is regal. Now someone full
of Jesus moves through the park
preaching to purple-eyed drunks.
Acorns drop like hail pellets.
A three-year-old roll down a
slope, bedazzled, giggling.

The old man smiles at this,
arrives at the conservatory,
cough and spits. 


hans ostrom 2021