Odes to the State of Michigan

Petosky Stones

Lake Michigan Shorelines

That Wild Great Lake:

Lines Written on Lake Michigan

The lake was smooth that dawn and like a pool
Of liquid glass or diamond: so profound

Was its tranquility, its quiet sound

Was soft as silk and sacred, sweet and cool.

I miss the echoes of those rolling waves

All rushing to the ancient sandy shore.

I find I cannot sleep well anymore

And peace of mind is what its whisper saves.

Not like those storms that roared in thunder forth

Some months before, when, hurling to the shore

Some sailboats, wrecked, can never venture more

Upon the lake from West to East to North.

In winter blizzards some Northeasters blow

From the Atlantic way into the west,

Till frigid surf has finally found its rest

In glittering icicles and ice-sheathed snow.

That length of long sea ice unto the sand

Which melts so slowly when the winds of spring

Return to waken all the blossoming,

Returning songbirds to their summer land.

Alas, I miss the lake and all its moods !

I miss the sound that moves my aching heart !

I miss the sight inspiring all my art !

That wild Great Lake and all that it includes !

Michigan's Common Loon

On the Pulse of Morning

Maya Angelou (1928-2014)

A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
Marked the mastodon,
The dinosaur, who left dried tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.

But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow.
I will give you no hiding place down here.

You, created only a little lower than
The angels, have crouched too long in
The bruising darkness
Have lain too long
Face down in ignorance.
Your mouths spilling words

Armed for slaughter.
The Rock cries out to us today, you may stand upon me,
But do not hide your face.

Across the wall of the world,
A River sings a beautiful song. It says,
Come, rest here by my side.

Each of you, a bordered country,
Delicate and strangely made proud,
Yet thrusting perpetually under siege.
Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.
Yet today I call you to my riverside,
If you will study war no more. Come,
Clad in peace, and I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me when I and the
Tree and the rock were one.
Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your
Brow and when you yet knew you still
Knew nothing.
The River sang and sings on.

There is a true yearning to respond to
The singing River and the wise Rock.
So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew
The African, the Native American, the Sioux,
The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek
The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheik,
The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher.
They hear. They all hear
The speaking of the Tree.

They hear the first and last of every Tree
Speak to humankind today. Come to me, here beside the River.
Plant yourself beside the River.

Each of you, descendant of some passed
On traveller, has been paid for.
You, who gave me my first name, you,
Pawnee, Apache, Seneca, you
Cherokee Nation, who rested with me, then
Forced on bloody feet,
Left me to the employment of
Other seekers—desperate for gain,
Starving for gold.
You, the Turk, the Arab, the Swede, the German, the Eskimo, the Scot,
You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru, bought,
Sold, stolen, arriving on the nightmare
Praying for a dream.
Here, root yourselves beside me.
I am that Tree planted by the River,
Which will not be moved.
I, the Rock, I the River, I the Tree
I am yours—your passages have been paid.
Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need
For this bright morning dawning for you.
History, despite its wrenching pain
Cannot be unlived, but if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.

Lift up your eyes upon
This day breaking for you.
Give birth again
To the dream.

Women, children, men,
Take it into the palms of your hands,
Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts
Each new hour holds new chances
For a new beginning.
Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.

The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space to place new steps of change.
Here, on the pulse of this fine day
You may have the courage
To look up and out and upon me, the
Rock, the River, the Tree, your country.
No less to Midas than the mendicant.
No less to you now than the mastodon then.

Here, on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister’s eyes, and into
Your brother’s face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope—
Good morning.

"On the Pulse of Morning" from ON THE PULSE OF MORNING by Maya Angelou, copyright © 1993 by Maya Angelou. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

A Great Blue Heron Fishing

Boundary Waters

by Douglas Brown

The man rested his paddle carefully next to the bundle. My favorite time of day. Dusk. The light was soft, The water still as lakeside glass, insects skimming over touching, laying down a perfect parabola and then touching again. He still felt her kiss and touch on cheek and hand. He smiled at the bundle. Everything I need and more. Sometime back a ways, paddling easy in a light chop, he had forgotten to worry about it. What did doctors know. Resting, he had taken a cookie from the bundle and ate it, looking at each bite before. Dusk left him and the canoe went on, paddle easy, paddle strong, paddle easy, paddle strong. Surely, he had crossed it by now. And surely who gives a- His sudden laughter startled a Great Blue Heron. It flew up, its wings a miracle. The man let the canoe drift and looked to the beautiful darkening sky. He took another cookie from the bundle. I am ready. I am ready.

Northern Coastline of Isle Royale

“My History at Isle Royale” adds a complication:

          I use walking sticks now, step slowly

          from rock to rock, find my footing

          among the roots.

Our guide is older now, his route a bit more precarious. There is “no need for nostalgia here” and both urgency and peace in his memories and observations. In “When the Eagle Came to Her Nest,” he remembers “the hesitation in the air // as she spread her wings…// as added pressure / in my chest.” I feel it, too.

There is joy in bushwhacking, a counting of jays, awe at the stars, knowledge of public spots and secret trails, respect for creatures at rest or carrying on with their lives, and through it all a sense of what would be lost if we don’t “let them be left” here, mostly undisturbed by human beings, and compassion as well for those humans, their “cities beginning to die as their water tables fall.”

There’s a big picture in this small book. As Taylor sums it up in “Twenty-First Century Wild,” “I’m not sure if my focus has narrowed or if I’m finally thinking about the whole world!”

On this little island, with gulls calling, dragonflies swooping, eagles diving, wild iris blooming, life thriving in sun or in fog, the speaker of these poems can live hushed and amazed, apart from the screens, the stresses, the woes of civilization, glad and briefly apart from the sad truth:

          Here alone in all this space

          I cannot believe our world is dying.

Maybe, if we pay attention the way these poems do, our world can live again.

PROSE LINK

Dramatic Lighthouses

"The Lighthouse Keeper Wonders"

 

by Edgar Guest

 

The light I've tended for forty years

is now to be run by a set of gears,

the keeper said, and it isn't nice

to be put ashore by a mere device.

Now, fair or foul the winds that blow

or smooth or rough the sea below,

It is all the same. The ships at night

will run to an automatic light.

 

The clock and gear which truly turn

Are timed and set so the light shall burn.

But, did ever an automatic thing

set plants about in early spring?

And did ever a bit of wire and gear

A cry for help in the darkness hear?

Or welcome callers, and show them through

The lighthouse rooms, as I used to do?

 

"Tis not malice these things I say,

All men must bow to the newer way.

But it's strange for a lighthouse man like me

After forty years on shore to be.

And I wonder now--will the grass stay green?

Will the brass stay bright and the windows clean?

And will ever that automatic thing

Plant marigolds in early spring?

Upper Michigan's Black Night Skies

How the Milky Way was Made

by Natalie Diaz

My river was once unseparated. Was Colorado. Red-

fast flood. Able to take

       anything it could wet—in a wild rush—

                                 all the way to Mexico.

Now it is shattered by fifteen dams
over one-thousand four-hundred and fifty miles,

pipes and pumps filling
swimming pools and sprinklers

      in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

To save our fish, we lifted them from our skeletoned river beds,
loosed them in our heavens, set them aster —

      ‘Achii ‘ahan, Mojave salmon,

                                Colorado pikeminnow—

Up there they glide, gilled with stars.
You see them now—

      god-large, gold-green sides,

                                moon-white belly and breast—

making their great speeded way across the darkest hours,
rippling the sapphired sky-water into a galaxy road.

The blurred wake they drag as they make their path
through the night sky is called

      ‘Achii ‘ahan nyuunye—

                                our words for Milky Way.

Coyote too is up there, crouched in the moon,
after his failed attempt to leap it, fishing net wet

      and empty, slung over his back—

                                a prisoner blue and dreaming

of unzipping the salmon’s silked skins with his teeth.
O, the weakness of any mouth

      as it gives itself away to the universe

                                of a sweet-milk body.

Just as my own mouth is dreamed to thirst
the long desire-ways, the hundred-thousand light year roads

      of your throat and thighs.