There are parks that are lonely
full of empty paths –
maples, old leafy oaks,
endlessly shedding
brown leaves crunching –
then snow, a soggy mass
hardening, narrowing,
the beaten width of two
boot prints.

This city park is built
over graveyards –
old bones plowed under
like china cups with no tea in them.
Death is there
like a bell with no clapper
a low moaning in the wind.

No one knows how many
still lie under a park
that shrinks each time diggers
move more earth, builders lay
foundations. Death resides
in bits of stone mixed
for concrete, wafts its no-smell
to circulate through new halls.
a perfume’s soundless
basenote under summer flowers.

The park holds its dead like scattered teeth
disremembered.
Children wait for snow
climb the sledding hill –
do not yet recognize lonely Death
in the shrieking rush downhill
tumbling over the near and silent past.