WHY OWEN PARK

by Kevin McIlvoy 

To shoot baskets
to blow my harp
to walk to walk

to blow my harp
to shoot baskets
is why I went there

and to laugh
with a whoosh
and to sing to sing

with my breath
is why and
to talk to talk

with my boots
shooshing path made
of gravel

mixed with chips
made from trees that
once ringed the pond

once cast crowns
made of shade 
of trembling shade

when they
still when
I

still when 
I still 
lived

is why

Kevin McIlvoy’s poems appear in The American Journal of Poetry, Asheville Poetry Review, Barzakh, The Common, Consequence, The Georgia Review, LEON, The Night Heron Barks, River Heron Review, The Shore, Scoundrel Time, Superstition Review, Willow Springs, Your Impossible Voice, and other magazines. He is the author of six novels and three collections of short fiction and prose poems, including most recently Is It So? Glimpses, Glyphs, & Found Novels (WTAW Press), and a posthumous collection of poems, Singing Lessons (Press 53). For twenty-seven years he was editor in chief of the literary magazine, Puerto del Sol. He taught in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program in Creative Writing from 1987 to 2019, and as a Regents Professor of Creative Writing in the New Mexico State University MFA Program from 1981 to 2008.  He died in September 2022. www.KevinMcIlvoy.com