Winter Vi - Valentine's Day On the Straits of Mackinaw

My wife and I traveled here To walk on water With ice pics and an old shiver The Mackinaw Straits Where Huron and Michigan open their mouths Kiss and hiss Under the legs of the great suspension bridge From which a high-rise temple Loomed over the chopped water Made of diamond snowstorms And sunrays soaring to the shards of heaven Then collapsed last night In a moon beam of oxygen bubbles A sparkling drowning man sinking and screaming Through the cold green of space A bartender in St. Ignace Suggesting “Alright, my friends, last call as the ice falls.” And in the crystal steam of sunrise The Straits are strewn with rubble Ice slabs of sapphire Thick as fallen floors of transparent concrete Overlapped with snow clouds wrestled down Like piles of swans with broken necks Moaning the violin song of whales If you put your ear To the hull of a sleeping Sheplers ferry While a stiff flag of torn pant leg Left behind out there Is picked at by a golden eagle Mistaken for an unburied sturgeon All this Arranged by the random disaster of beauty Which is why we came here on this journey Just us kids After all these years we built together Hand in hand like clipped wings White wisps at our temples Drawn up and down by the twists of universe Renewing our vows on Valentine’s Day Climbing atop The blue ice of the Mackinaw Straits Where we saw the bottom of the lake As much as we walked a clear sky.