Game Preserve or Like so many minivans, homeward
by Trevor Moffa
Stagnant looking despite the central fountain,
the Game Preserve duck pond is the backdrop
upon which timeless moments are exchanged
for stale bread between families and generations
of dependent birds, whole loaves by the slice
for a picture, fortifying the starchy world
of abandoned red-bellied sliders and goldfish
grown wild beneath the filmy divide
separating transients from once instinctual
creatures angel-winged into domestication.
The Game Preserve bison could walk through
a chain-link fence like it wasn’t there, and they do.
About a decade ago, driven by
the collapse of a nearby snowdrift,
and about a decade before that, driven
by a stray firework overhead,
they tested, or remembered, our frailty
and took to the park like ducks to water.
So, one bison-length beyond the first,
there is a second, identical chain-link fence.
It must be hard to get a good picture.
So many moments lost preparing,
refocusing, restaging, and recapturing
in search of the right one, lifting the children
onto the railing surrounding the Game
Preserve duck pond in the hope the right
moment is a close-up, more faces
and less friction in the background,
before settling back to the blacktop
so white with discarded twist-ties and bird shit
it’s like moving through static, like walking on
the first bits of reality regained
after being blinded by a flash
too frequent and too close,
the kind of flash that could drive a bison
past two identical chain-link fences,
past the waterfowl and the sign that reads,
Please do not feed the waterfowl,
and onto the blacktop, thundering,
like so many minivans, homeward.
*The last wild bison in Pennsylvania was shot in 1801. Through the 1920s officials relocated a herd of bison from Montana to Pennsylvania in consideration of protection and amusement.
Trevor Moffa is a poet and former coal miner, park ranger, bookseller, and sandwich artist from Pittsburgh, PA. Trevor helps as a reader for Chestnut Review, and his poems have recently appeared in Nimrod, Sampsonia Way Magazine, Roanoke Review, Chautauqua, and Sleet.