Look Park Pedal-Boats on a Tuesday

Inside the pedal-boat a comedy of friendship ripens

as little worlds collide and littler toes are cooled.

The big folks pedal and the smaller ones marvel at the slowness  that suddenly seems more reasonable

than any other vehicular velocity ever had. The slow

geese floating along the still bank; the barely in motion

water itself and the unseeable swimmers under its spell;

the clouds reflected in the surface too are all masters

of place and pace. As their parents pedal solidly and placidly,

murmuring oaths remarkable for their unrehearsed

clarity, the children feel inside them a warm downpour

of a different kind of petal, a florid idiom cobbled

together from forgiving vowels and soft-hearted

consonants. The pedal-boat fills up like a piano

in a forest, awash with hushes and unhurried

entreaties to remain, to please remain, this way forever.

Just to Be Around Beauty is to Be Far  from Everything Else

What isn’t waking up is already on its way to a sleep

peopled by raindrops and bird-cadenced ripples.

I like to come here, Look Park, when the day

has only a handful of chances left in it. I find

a seat on a red bench and breathe so deeply

I can feel my late parents throbbing in the green

smells the trees, grass and pond have all collated

just so the sky has something it feels it belongs to.

And I belong to it too: this concert of concentrated

chances and cadences to which not only the sky and I,

but everyone else, asleep or awake, hold holy front-row tickets.

Connolly Ryan is a poet and senior lecturer at UMass Amherst Honors  College. You can contact him at connollyryanpi@hotmail.com.