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.
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