When did Millburn Park convert
to duotone, to grayscale rock
and ice with frozen winter birds?
The mallards went along with this?
Surprising. Or did I convert
and wander, color-sapped, into
a February Saturday?
I know this pond, it’s here we held
each other eighteen years ago
and mourned our unborn child’s death.
We viewed an ornamental spring,
embracing in our bubble globe
of sorrows, wretched lovers
in an allegoric Bosch tableau
of disengagement, Hell in Spring.
I haven’t been here since, and came
alone today. I’ve found
a bubble of my own, it seems,
through which I watch a man my age
across the pond, dumbfounded, stare
into the ice and rocks. He wears
an awkward yellow canvas coat
And fixates on the ducks that shake
the grayscale thaw from frozen wings,
confused and camouflaged in ice.
They drift between the rocks, and share
a kind of trapped and puzzled gaze.
Behind the trees, a child hollers
“Why can’t you keep up?” His father
somewhere: “Adam! Adam, wait!”