Ode to Ochang Lake Park
By Maya Nylund, a first-year ETA
PSA traveling at the speed of pixels spelling
balloons of trash, chemical spillage, I don’t look
today. I know. It says: meters and meters of rain
The runoff gushes into the ground, vortical—
I walk here everyday. Old ladies flap walking
sticks and fishermen’s hats, crinkle-faced
as the apple dolls out of Amish country
graceful sweeping in the Jinro‑bottle green.
A family of ducks lives behind that bush, there,
dinosaur nostrils and yellow enamel breathing—
remember when the world was liquid swamp?
This place was scooped from the dry earth,
manicured marsh, an artificial lake; once
there were lotuses, but now there are none.
The benches are marked for lovers. They walk
the LED moonlight while we talk at the pace
of pixels, always orbiting, never nearing, and I
remember—that everything is expanding
and dissolving, the whole world tending
towards entropy. The mold spores splattered
across my gym’s ceiling, reeds mangling water,
the home address I don’t know by heart—
Remember? That to prune is to give attention to,
but to disentangle is to love. A man shelters under
a pagoda, head shaking, rueful with delay,
knowing that to expand is also to evolve.
The lake swells, roiling, swallowing the flood.
The horizon may unsettle you, the neat and
numbered apartments, but this place reminds.
We must unravel to grow. My cuticles constantly
fraying, the dampness always in the bathroom,
the laundry in the corner and the dust bunnies
at the doctor’s, spinning toward the dark…