water & light

Whitefish Bay, Lake Superior, MI

placid cold water
reflect dim northern light:
autumn Whitefish shores


Whitefish Bay, Lake Superior, MI


Lake Michigan, Manistique, MI

Restless in early spring, nothing yet emerged from flower beds or under the juniper. Tepid warmth not enough for lounging in the afternoon, still too cool for travel. Monks stay in their cells, cool dew musking the air from walls carved into living rock. Melte makes the trickle a water cascade down cliffs each spring, then dessicates by autumn's late heat. The time of cicadas a long way off, still. The time for woolen robes still too close. Cabins fevered by agitated dreams, short nights full of tossed blankets and rumpled sheets.


Lake Michigan, near Cedar River, MI

We want to go, go, get out, go, power over the next hill, see the next rise looming before being crested, walking faster in the cool morning, calves cramped each dusk, till the rhythm takes over, the rhythm of running, of speech before the empty quarters, the sky widening till it covers everything, till it corners us by rain-washed groves and grottoes. Too soon to go, we want to go, go, go now, leave now, leave everything behind, just to go, the religion of pilgrimage and journey-bread, set out in haste, return in sated sorrow. Too soon to want to go, go, still want to go, leave now, go, and return again only late in the year, in the first real snowfall's embrace.


Lake Superior, Upper Peninsula, MI

taunted by warm winds
of mid-March, the mendicant
longs for summer's road