The letter S is not a fact.
You sat in your car at the local park.
You had parked there to get in some work,
to bridge a gap between meetings.
The computer gaped on your lap, blank.
The Twisp town park has a new playground.
It boasts the latest in burnished wood
and multicolored plastic, with slides—
and a new but very old-school swing set:
four long gray metal pipes plumb the earth
at acute angles, straddling twin runways;
from the connecting bar atop, sandcast links
chain downward to hard black rubber seats.
When you arrived, a teen of some sort
was winging high on the nearest swing.
The figure, dressed in jeans and hoodie,
time and again, stretched twelve feet high
then yielded once more to gravity, legs bent,
dropping down to the bottom of the arc,
then backing up to zero gee—
before legs drove again to apex.
Who knows how long this had been going,
this very first thing you had noticed,
even before you had plucked your convertible
two-in-one tablet computer from your bag?
The teen, it seemed, swung with purpose.
Every retreat and every thrust
was delivered with smooth, determined zeal.
No idle after-school past-time, this.
Fifteen minutes. You hadn’t moved
while the swinging teen never stopped;
and at one point another teen, a boy,
pulled his car alongside and parked:
perhaps this was a rendezvous.
The boy opened and closed his door
and settled onto a picnic bench;
eighty yards across the field
the swinger swung uninterrupted.
The boy appeared not to notice.
Later, texting, he rose to leave;
and too far away for me to hear,
the swinging teen’s phone buzzed.
Slowing, but only to check a text,
the teen drew a phone from the hoodie pocket
and thumbed a few characters with one hand—
mission accomplished; back to the swing.
The boy, on a completely different task,
returned to his car, closed the door,
and drove away. Your vigil resuming,
little happened over the next half-hour.
Your next meeting quickly approached.
The sky remained blue in the cool air.
Tree rings grew. The hooded teen swung.
You had thought to write something profound,
The letter S is not a fact
to continue from there, a poetic riff
on metaphor and onomatopoeia.
But the teen knows more than clever words,
than meter, rhyme, and scansion.
And you drive on. The teen’s still there—
climbing that stairway toward heaven.