You can’t see everything from here.

On Sundays, I go down                                to the Ina Coolbirth Park
to wait for the sun to sink.
And I sit on the waxed green bench
behind the coyote bush
where I can see half of
the Oakland bay bridge,
a floating church.
The tanned leaves
                                                                          and the elderberry branches,
they border my sight,
form three quarters of a frame.
. 

They say—                     look here.                   Just now, the light,
see the industrial steeple,                           the steel like bronze shimmer,
see it pull the entire city up,                       up above from the water line.

I sit, watch time pass

through the shrubbery my neck cranes to catch the light fleeing

the now darkening bridge reaches through

concrete slabs and tinted panes.

I can’t see everything from here,

but between what leaves long brooding shadows,

I have a hint of the place that we’re all reaching towards.

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Blue,

like Houghton’s pond,

the way the surface isn’t exactly green between muted clouds

the baby blue bike my dad promises for when I turn 18,

the round miraflex glasses I wore until I could see through square black frames

the tint behind just-opened eyes, hazy, almost pink

a scar of enamel paint, I see, a reminder folded into the guardrail on Wampatuck road,

but the cuts in this land, below a tourniquet of bled-through laminated maps,

still open, festering blue flesh

blue, this trail marker above the dried out bog,

where the wampanoag roamed, look how the rocks are sometimes gray

blue, the way the words sink into soiled white signs that spell out—Help,

Find The Arsonist, fifty acres of trees now bruised, look,

the way the Blue Hills Reservation isn’t blue at all.

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On Sundays, Hudson Li goes down to the park.