"Pendleton King Park, My Twentieth Spring"

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 1990

I remember clinging to the chainlink fence, feeding the ducks.
A tuning fork of March wind
was sounding out the season's new notes with a moan,
as my heart reverberated in sympathy.
It struck its plangent chord and held it long.
Wringing stinging whirlwinds out of the sand,
those late wintry furies raged, with wild palms slapping.
Even then I could not be swayed . . . .
I kept a niggardly watch over my flock
of orange charges below, matching squawk for squawk
those kids who carelessly played
in swarms in the nearby park.
Begging for crumbs, they took what they could get.
I was their Pied Piper;
they surged like water around a rock . . . . And yet,
inexplicably, I just let

go – those idling hands held nothing but time,
though I kept them working with my weird, wired worry.
And still the stale grains fell from nowhere, like confetti.
The icy, steel mesh smelled tinny and tasted of dirty money.

I had been here before, in the ninth grade,
with a bowl-skulled boy who had a crush on me . . . . Back then,
we walked on cushioned grass shaded like a zebra's skin,
as we dragged the tensed, waffled faces of our tennis rackets
down through the mud with our classmates' good names . . . .

He said psychosis was the sure diagnosis
for the infamous Son of Sam's ills.
I imagined I was the criminal –
and in my dazzled sick mind
I was already guilty of gruesomer crimes.
I could not have known it then, but my sin
was committed against no body but mine.

I clung to the fence as to a cold mother.
It was no use. She would not keep me.

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing. You may contact her at ltpkhp@aol.com.