malden_park ovenbird This is the highest point in the city. It’s not saying much. The land here lies low against the shoulder of the river, its silty lips pressed to the mouth of Lake St. Clair. A church spire rises from the haze of Tecumseh while decades of refuse rot beneath my feet. The ground beneath me was once a landfill, in use from the 1950s to 1970s. The city buried the evidence of a generation and planted milkweed for the Monarchs and now I wait for the undead remnants of my father’s childhood to thrust up through the thawing ground and grab my ankles. I wonder if the matchbox cars he drove through the dirt on hot summer afternoons are oxidizing in the dark alongside the flaked cremains of a million TV dinners. He was seventeen when this dump was closed. You have to invert those numbers to approach his current age, a fact he keeps repeating because it seems so impossible. The slope demands more than his shins will tolerate. It would have been easy two years ago. He jogged up as a joke then. But now? Now the infection that settled in his blood leaves a legacy of lethargy that just won’t let go. He’s out of breath before the top, but pushes through because his mind remembers what his body won’t—the ease of thighs and calves and knees coordinating movement ever upward with little effort at all. From here he can dig down through the stratified shale of his past and remember running up and down the block with a cap gun in his hand, or riding his bike across town to the convenience store where he once earned some spare change standing in the window, waving for hours, because the owners thought it would attract customers. He can pick through the decades all the way down to the bones of his first dog who sported a perpetual patch of mange but has never been matched for tongue lolling loyalty. There are parts of the past that are suddenly so clear they can focus light into a single searing point. He wonders if he’s the ant that will burn in the concentrated blaze of his youth’s immolation. These days molehills are mountains whether he makes them or not and he’ll pay for the privilege of this encompassing view. But he turns around and takes it all in, the arching span of the bridge, the distant industrial fires, the streets that are no longer his. 260303 what's it to you? who go blather from