There's a park my son loves to go
to that was built in WPA times.
And it has a tunnel underneath the road that he loves
to go through and a train in it and a giant concrete slide that
was grandfathered in before liability, obviously.
And so he calls it tunnel park.
That's what he calls it.
So that's the name of this poem.
"Tunnel Park."
80 years ago during those famous dark times
when the government paid men to build bridges and dams,
they carved this park my son loves out of a hill.
The men needed to keep working to get paid.
So they made a long, dangerous concrete slide kids scream
down, their parents watching with their hands
over their mouths, then dug this unnecessary cool aperture
full of obscure shadows through the hillside
to the garden of famous roses I don't care about.
And, finally, some secret stares,
no matter how many times we found,
always seem like they were forever waiting only for us.
My son and I went upward.
His red shirt kept disappearing into the shadows.
I became tired from pointless worry.
So we sat on one stone step and shared some blue water.
Through the leaves, we could see a giant crumbling pastel house.
It once was grand.
Its dark windows still look down on everything.
It was so quiet.
I could hear the message everyone knows.
Worse times are coming.
Who isn't afraid?
Only the dead.
We went farther.
The stairs never ended.
We had to turn back to our lives,
knowing there is mystery even in the new world.