I never wrote an essay
about Kosciuszko Park.
But you should know that black umbrellas 
opened like portals on slate-sky days,
that puddles gathered
along the circular path
by the baseball diamonds, in
the shade of century trees.

I might have opened with
the crabapples fireworking into
magenta-pink against
mid-May lushness.
I might have spoken to the city
and learned the species of the trees. But look:
You can stop mid-jog by soccer fields,
breathless and tugging at basketball shorts.
You can crane your neck: Those crowns of 
green and brown, blotting out the Sears Tower
from the clean blue sky
first inched forth from the soil when
men wore suits in parks.

I took a call from my mom
running in Koz Park,
by the dugout with the sloped bench,
learning where the ledges formed
in the asphalt, the ‘S’ of tar
on the surface over some stout root,
how a child commits to memory the spot
in the sidewalk where dandelions grow,
the toothed ridge on the neighbor’s driveway
that may burst your bike’s front tire.

I took a call from my mom
in Koz Park before a July 4th barbeque,
in that COVID summer 
when the air was deadly in bars.
I walked home in sweat and sun
from Koz Park knowing 
that the treatments hadn’t worked.
I joined college friends in masks outside,
asking one another, with gentle health concerns,
“Should we wash off the bags
of potato chips?” I told them
nothing was new.

I first found the park 
on a COVID walk
at the end of a new, unfurling street.
I remember families in paper masks
escaping the clutch of living rooms.
I kept Mom up to date on construction:
The red-AstroTurfed baseball diamond
arising from the muddy northeast corner.
I had to step through the grass
to complete the circle path, dodging the dug-up
earth.
I let her know this, the only news I had. 
I tracked mud from the park
through the streets back home.
I let her know this, too, as long as it was true.

In time, pathways reopened,
masks disappeared outdoors,
and I made it home to Iowa again.
By then we all had new habits,
our lives reorganized 
and bodies changed,
one way or another,
by disease.

The essay I never wrote
about Kosciuszko Park
would have posted in a neighborhood blog
that died with COVID-19. It may be in my phone
or only in a gray memory
how many times I walked home from those fields
thinking of streets in Chicago
that look the same enough as
streets in Iowa Falls, remembering
dead and dying leaves sweeping into
storm gutters
that look the same enough as anywhere,
thinking of words that might cement
for all of us
what was disappearing
once I got around to writing them.