A City
A Play
A Cliff
A Camaro
A Pond
Retrogenesis: A Brief Memoir With Keyless Check-In
Encomium for Navigators
Limax Maximus
Yelping the Beatnik
&
Yelping Chateau Aeronautique
Telegraph is tough,
so is October.
Telegraph is a road;
October is a way
of fulminating
boredom that comes
with great flashes of
color. The hour it takes
to name US-24,
a synonym for Telegraph,
we eschew our voices,
which leaves
us either roads
or conductive
percussive taps
to convey our love.
You tell me rumble
strips are tender
despite their
jarringness; it
doesn’t sound quite
like a word, jarringness,
but I repeat it
to stay awake
as we head for
Toledo and its sprawling
botanical gardens.
You remark upon
the pond life
and the stench
of cormorants
that have drifted
west of where we
last encountered them,
Promedica Parkway
is a sea, you say,
and seabirds
clutch their own boredom
in what we erroneously
describe as claws.
You call it an afternoon
as easy as the midnight,
a pill I might
administer a friend.
Our hermeneutics exist along
a polarity of
affirmation and alienation
at intermission we stood around
a round cocktail table agonizing
over whether or not to buy a drink
for the next act
the players in the play were pretending
to get legless drunk
as the night wore on
their night the night in not of the play
agonizing does not mean in agony
we were agonizing but not in agony
the blue jeans I wore to the play
(you can go to a play and get a poem
as long as you’re not too enthused
by histrionics)
were stained with marinara and
smelled like classroom chalk
the way the prop bottle broke
onstage lacked the verisimilitude of breaking
glass—at the beginning of Act III
the lead actor could be seen using a handheld
vacuum to suck up the prop glass
and a wet rag to collect the finer bits
that we were to believe had been ground
nearly to sand by shoes
but the stage never got clean
and by dawn it was also strewn
with snapdragons he had picked
he insisted
by moonlight though there was an ensuing
argument about the existence of the moon
or whether the moon had left the sky
after the play we drove away
from Buick City on the UAW Parkway
which is I-475 to I-75/US 23 to
US 23 to I-96 and then finally Telegraph
our absurd insular logic hyperextended
by hashed-up lane markers
and the rill of rumble strips
There’s a pause in the day’s occupations,*
a lamb in the cratered children’s hospital,
a flattening of the topography of state affairs.
In a tourist port we’re wind surfers
without the fabric it takes to stave off falling,
without the staves through fabric to brace
the chute into a parallelogrammic shape.
An ocean predetermines harm and carries on
in introspection. We stare down the sheer face
with a feeling akin to awe. Nowhere
is the bilious sea more narrow. What stays
unfathomable should be remarked upon with low
polysyllabic intensifiers worthy of the scene,
even apostrophe or a doubling of the vocative noun
will do. O gendarme up the coast
where the occasional wave or poem
cleaves—Dover, Dover, for this cruelty
wind and water trained you.
*This phrase comes from Longfellow’s poem “The Children’s Hour”
When empiricism turns into common sense,
we’re listening to Bob Seger
is an epigram, maybe, for a spinnaker’s face
or the bumper of a ’78 SS, but the airbrushing,
including the font, would have to be just right.
“Cruising,” we call it, and we cruise too,
and it gets hard to tell whether we’re being
figurative or imprecise. Elijah brought his car
to us in jubilation, spinning nearly frictionless
on the bleached asphalt of the burnout lane.
It’s all time’s arrow here, now. We know
we’re in the past as the matter cools
and dissipates, foul censer’s smoke
ascending to the heavens with its life.
Hitting the note is more important than hitting the octave, or not hitting it in most cases
This can be higher or lower
There’s more to art than fatalism or affirmation, or if not more a difference
among art and fatalism and affirmation
I don’t have my piano with me is a superfluous denoting phrase
So is The examples don’t matter. Though they also don’t
Spirituality is a string of non-sequiturs beyond the purview of hierophants
Like a field-sobriety test, the disingenuous exercise of evidence-building
I’d rather just draw blood in the presence of a lawyer
That we have a self to care for is an a priori assumption that has spawned a cottage industry of
self-fulfilling drivel
I end up thinking of pond scum and making post hoc causal assumptions
The word scum scares me
Nutrient-rich, phosphor-laden, the nymphaeaceae, rhizomatic daughters of themselves, bloom
into wax corollas
Retrogenesis: A Brief Memoir With Keyless Check-In
What could the fate of the Weimar Republic mean
to a couple of Air BnB renters on a three-day bender
lamenting the impersonality of the keyless check-in
in a region whose geographical beauty is rivaled
only by its provincial bigotries? The problem being
dissociation. The problem being memory
brimming with false nostalgia. We used to stay
at Sandcastles on the Beach, an old school
Michigan hotel on the Saginaw Bay,
and the innkeeper, Paul, would call the Farm
to make our dinner reservation and instruct them
to seat us in Amy’s section. There was no Amy
at the Farm, but they were too polite
to correct him and took down our reservation anyway,
seating us in Christine’s or Jim’s section,
which was always fine by us. The problem
being Amy sounding like the name of one
who’d work at The Farm and too many middlemen,
the problem being the gendered phrase “middle men” and a man
with too many names in his head and too many
seasons in a role requiring him to remember
each acquaintance.
The Farm specialized in seasonal agricultural products
grown and raised in the area that enabled
diners to congratulate themselves for making
ethical consumer decisions while enjoying
a delicious meal—pork chops of hogs from Fletcher’s
Ranch on Pinnebog, beef of free range cows
raised on grass and clover. We could’ve called
the restaurant ourselves, but we liked talking to Paul in the foyer
of that little ranch house that doubled as an office.
Decades ago my Grandpa Bill used to drive up here
to read paperbacks on the beach and swim
in the motel pool. William Hugh O’Neill,
whose namesake, Hugh O’Neill, was the 2nd Earl
of Tyrone who fought against Elizabeth I’s cavalry
until the sacking of Ulster. He’d leave Ireland with his men
in a defeat that came to be known as “The Flight of the Earls.”
He’s rumored to have lived out his life
in Rome on a modest papal pension.
Grandpa Bill served with Merrill’s Marauders
in the China-Burma-India Theater, which means,
among other things, that he never really met a fascist
until Nixon came to power in ’68 on the votes
of his hapless neighbors, “the silent majority,”
that plurality of morons. A public defender,
Grandpa Bill grew his sideburns long and wore a black
moratorium armband to court during Vietnam.
He died of Alzheimer’s Disease. In later years,
he could remember his days at Visitation High School vividly
but not the name of the grandson who sat before him;
even so, he remembered to instruct me to never
drink whiskey, only beer, and to never,
under any circumstances, talk to cops.
I followed one of these dictums.
They call it “retrogenesis,” forgetting the present
while living in the distant past; the problem being
infantilization, confusion, embarrassment. Tonight
Sarah and I watch fireworks explode
over a kettle lake. The problem being an outwash plain
marred by ridiculous flags, the problem being
patriotism devolved to jingoistic cult.
I imagine riding here in a ’66 Mustang pony,
a classic now, but back when my grandfather drove one
it was considered an economy car. The problem
being the fascist’s name on every grill, the problem
being every car today looks like a Ford Escape.
I don’t need to tell you we live in a dark time
when to worry about the aesthetic vapidity
of contemporary automobile design is itself vapid.
The problem being the American right and a left divided
beyond the point of being functionally left
(I remember, though I wasn’t born,
how they tore down Humphrey for his role
in securing the Tonkin Resolution). The way out
of didactic politics for the symbolist poets
of the 1970s was the deep image,
was to arrogate the poetics of the east
and purify the self through the self-erasure
accompanying meditative introspection.
They offered us the moon in tamaracks,
a bronze butterfly on a black bough,
the diffractions of the sharpened blade,
the shadow of the last defoliated tree
on the banks of the Mekong River.
The problem being onanistic navel-gazing;
the problem being allusion as appropriation.
I find myself returning to them again, those poets,
and again I’d like to stand in Paul’s little office
to talk pan-fried pork chops and corn liquor
distilled from maize just down the road.
Now there’s a code you type into a box.
Red ash spiders across the stars then fades
before settling into the lake. A belted kingfisher
lights from a cottonwood in panic.
Flew over Three Mile Island on the way to Harrisburg
for a first cousin’s second wedding with only
a vague sense of cataclysm. The concrete cooling towers
had the look of scuffed herringbone that day
and we didn’t think about bellied-up fish or loves
lost and found or nuclear disasters.
Everybody’s happy, but it’s priggish, anyway, to speculate
about anybody else’s happiness.
From around 10,000 feet we could see the right triangle
of Point Pelee, Pelee Island
like a patch of quilt torn off and framed
in something blue, granite pilings hashing out the boundaries
of The Livingston Channel, and Grosse Ile
(I’d spent so much time there as a boy)
looked large for an island in these waters,
and that it’s large for an island in these waters
is a fact that you can only glean
from this kind of vantage point. Further west
the Fermi towers’ bellies were blackening
as they exhaled little puffs of steam into the blue sky
above Brest Bay across from Sterling State Park
where we stayed one spring for a couple nights
in a little rustic cabin. That weekend
I shot and posted pictures of a desiccated
walleye carcass with pin bones the color of toffee,
a frayed baseball cap washed up in sand,
Fermi I and II at dusk, and a cheesecake recipe
from Detroit Beach Pizza Restaurant with the caption,
“We almost lost Detroit.” I was up all night
drinking wine, scribbling in a notebook, and listening
to Gil Scott Heron. I woke Sarah at 2am
when I spotted two horizontal rows
of orange lights drifting toward the shore.
She pressed her face next to mine at the window.
UFO, she said, laughing as she wandered
back to bed. I watched them motor into the lagoon,
a DNR patrol boat I’d learn the next day.
I thought of how bays and bights and parallax
and boats and planes and lights through
graphite panes can trick us and how a trick
of perception categorically cannot be perceived
as a trick. I tried to remember the details
about the War of 1812 (we learned the imperialist
version on a ferry ride to Put-In-Bay Island),
and there’s a politics to calling it the War of 1812 instead of
the 60 Years War, the Righteous War of Tecumseh’s
Confederacy who got sold out at Ghent where
the van Eycks’ polyptych altarpiece presents
a stern God who resembles, forgive me, a hirsute Commodore Perry.
I’m thinking of land grabs and exploitation, your border
waters, your bridges, your neighbor islands a country
and a mere nautical mile apart. We watched
the first inning of the Tigers game
that Saturday afternoon at Jerry’s Frenchtown Inn
and listened to Marty Robbins on the jukebox.
The owner told us they’re there every afternoon
from spring through fall listening to country-western
and watching baseball on the TV. We settled up
and drove back to the park, this settling up, you wanna saddle up,
we should get on our horse when a barroom
is everything we want, but you can’t be a regular
where you don’t return, and you can’t sit and read
a book in this kind of place without getting
side-eyed by the regulars. Back at the park
a pileated drummed an eastern cottonwood.
It’s all rather precarious, pecuniary, vast,
and small, which is why we applaud sometimes
when the wheels on a short regional flight
touch down, why we bring ourselves to maunder
shamelessly about birds and bars
and lagoons and baseball games. We listened to the waves
and the freightliners on the interstate,
which made the same insistent susurrations.
The indecency of the epicurean is a weigh station
we’d rather skip. Who counts truck axles
and calibrates freight tonnage to what’s allowable?
I wish I could, and the ostensible answer is
the state police, but there seem to be other
agencies involved. I glassed a freighter
in my Nikon Aculon binoculars and had no concept
of its distance from the shore. I wonder
how many propellers this lake has ruined.
If they were relics, someone would dive for them.
The mollusc shells (quagga, zebra mussels)
crumbled to a chitinous grain as we walked.
Once they hosted such elegant destructive creatures.
Leopard slug, biggest slug,
keeled to the amorphous ship
of your body, slippery fold of brain
dreaming up an hour when birds
are cradled in their spruces
and cannot peck at you.
They’ve salted you on every continent,
save one, scorched the pedal ganglia
with which you feel, and still you live
by preference where humans dwell.
Iridescent mucus trail, shield
marbled like mineral streaks in stone,
Pliny the Elder tortured you,
extracting carbonate of lime
from your internal shell, a calming agent,
a succor to the ones who dig
their heels in ungulates, following
the mantles of their spears.
At the erroneously-named restaurant
in Chicago, I stand at the bar
overlooking the river reading Lew Welch,
who wrote of this town, It snuffles
on the beach of its Great Lake like a
blind, red, rhinoceros.
It’s already running us down.
I tell the bartender the river’s running
the wrong way and they should hang
a fragment from Welch’s
“He Finally reaches the city”
from the wall for authenticity’s sake.
Find yourself at some ridiculous
task, say
I drink a vodka soda and watch
Chicago’s Emerald Lady
sightseeing boat pass by and all,
for a moment, is well.
I consider what it must be like to disappear.
Throw the phone and wallet in the river
and stagger into the arboreal fires
of the mammoth Gary Works.
Urinating in the hostess’ flowerbed,
the party raging on, above
might be a good choice for the wall.
At seven this morning
I was exhilarated and sad riding
the Wolverine past all my friends—
Jim Flynn in the Village Ford showroom
selling F-150s to sportsmen, carpenters,
and local drunks, Lauchlan
reciting poems to himself while
grouting the basement floor,
and Sarah, Sarah, already too far away,
and imagine all your life
and past lives.
I should call her and tell her I’m here.
I should tell her I’m at a place
erroneously called The Beatnik.
I should tell her I told the waiter
the river was flowing the wrong way
and they should hang a fragment
from one of Lew Welch’s Chicago poems
on the wall for authenticity’s sake.
That I heard the awful clatter
of the El come down Division Street
and Algren’s ghost is gone.
At 27th Letter I talk
to my friend Erin, the bookseller,
and wonder how Horace’s
friends reacted
to the encomiums
and epistles that named them,
whether a man
like him was capable
of having friends.
It’s 10-23-23. I’m 43
& a numerical coincidence,
a birthday, on its own
is no occasion for a poem.
My copy of David Ferry’s
translation of The Odes
rests face down
on an oaken table
(6 verso/7 recto)
to keep the page.
But Erin isn’t writing odes
& that essay about her sister
has caused some strife.
It’s an amalgam of memories
she explains—telephone calls
from dimly-lit psych wards,
disappearances & worry,
long, long months of silence;
happier memories, too,
drawn poignant as polaroids
in her lyrical prose—
her sister riding a horse
through woodland sunflowers,
the Soo Locks
on the St. Mary’s River
lit by the beacon
of a lighthouse’s Fresnel lens.
If he had no friends,
where did he pluck those proper nouns
whose obliviated people he invokes?
she asks me.
I never named my sister in the piece,
but she won’t talk to me.
So which stories are we allowed
to tell? I wonder.
She shrugs, and we’re not sure
we’ve settled anything.
I buy a book called
Commotion of the Birds
before I leave. Later
in his career he seems to write
without agency or risk,
she says, pointing at the name
on the spine, like a joke
he keeps telling
at his own expense.
I glance at the ampersand
painted on the wall behind her.
Our stories are all polysyndeton,
I guess, & every essay’s
a thorny brake of intertexts,
I almost tell her.
I picture etchings
on Etruscan tablets,
the crumbling papyrus fragments
of Archilocus (Horace
imitated him), known
as the first poet to use iambs
and write exclusively from personal
experience, whose satiric verse
stung the muses &
humiliated his ex-fiancé,
Neobule, daughter
of Lycambes,
driving her to suicide.
I think of the divagations & erasures
of a language as it staggers into
Greek & Latin & vulgate
& beyond toward these
stories whose sad tropes
we’ve inherited, stories that are
and are not ours to tell.
stories whose sad tropes
we’ve inherited, stories that are
and are not ours to tell.
Wasps hover above
the seaside grave of Archilocus.
Erin’s unnamed sister
white-knuckles
a telephone receiver
and shrieks
for all Lycambes’ daughters.
I’m in a brewery and wine bar on a dirt stretch
of Pentecost Highway well over 50
days past Easter. Back at the lake house
Sarah is asleep, dreaming up stories
in the style of Barthelme.
I won’t etymologize the name except to say
it draws on air and water, the region’s
legacy of building bombers
at the Willow Run Airplane Plant
and destroying pontoon boat propellers
in sand shoals of kettle lakes.
I think I taste the earth, anticipatory
aleatory round, it’s embarrassing
to say “terroir,” embarrassing to drink
like this and function, if a few lines
in a college ruled notebook counts
as function. The soundstage is empty,
the light rack alternating senselessly
between blue and red, between
aorist imperative and question—
Keep the habit.
Do you see yourself up there?
Cal Freeman (he/him) is the music editor of The Museum of Americana: A Literary Review and author of the books Fight Songs (Eyewear 2017) and Poolside at the Dearborn Inn (R&R Press 2022). His writing has appeared in many journals including Atticus Review, Image, The Poetry Review, Verse Daily, Under a Warm Green Linden, North American Review, The Moth, Oxford American, River Styx, and Advanced Leisure. He is a recipient of the Devine Poetry Fellowship (judged by Terrance Hayes), winner of Passages North's Neutrino Prize, and a finalist for the River Styx International Poetry Prize. Born and raised in Detroit, he teaches at Oakland University and serves as Writer-In-Residence with InsideOut Literary Arts Detroit. His chapbook of poems, Yelping the Tegmine, has just been released.
