Cheboygan

 

Now I’m in Cheboygan

 

The band plays ‘Under the Bridge’

 

There’s a Wolverine above the mirror

 

‘Bernadette’ I told my car ‘You’re my gal, just you’ finally doing 90 miles and free from labor day Zingerland traffic

 

One guy looks like James Franco a bit punched out by ‘small town drama’ as he put it..

He’s seeing one of the two pretty bartenders, 

(actually every single woman in this bar is beautiful and none are single) but his mind is doing 50, his mind is playing pool.. 

 

What good advice I could give him? Zero.

I just sipped slowly my sierra and wrote on the napkin

 

The drummer’s mother

 

‘You write?’ the woman with the walker came up to me

 

‘I’m the drummer’s mother’

 

I looked over at the drummer, he was drumming loud

 

All I could see in her eyes was acceptance and love

 

‘This is just a small good town’

 

‘I’m a published poet,’ she said ‘I’ll read you one next break’

 

She went back to her table and danced, she danced with a walker, in some ways this was the most beautiful thing I’d seen, well since Micha, or the tall girl swaying with the big tattooed guy

 

She recited me a poem

 

It was about ..

 

a belonging that I couldn’t understand

 

She waved and cheered as I drifted out the door

 

the music still drummed bright

 

Wooden Shark 

 

‘This is the Road’

I told myself aloud

Driving up to UP

 

You leave before you can’t leave

 

Stay or leave

Right or left

 

Those are essentially the only questions

 

You watch everything pass and 

Feel the weight of it passing pass

 

Only the true form of your longing 

will remain

 

The rest are blades of grass passing

 

The green you keep

 

There’s a wooden shark above her fridge

 

‘This is the Road’

 

You leave before you

Can’t leave

 

300 miles north

 

Like trying 

To write about

Falling out of that plane

I can only write this one now

 

I give up

 

A Letter

 

I started to write her a letter

But it threatened to dis-

Close the mystery

That early river

Civilizations

Created myths and

Fire to reveal and conceal

I tripped over the grail in the snow with her one night too soon to know what was inside the empty trees of the great forest 

 

On my side of the landslide

I was still running

 

We were alone 

In the letter

I stopped writing