This is a poem I workshopped today for class, it’s not very long but i’ll do a line break anyway so it doesn’t show up as being too long okay okayÂ
Waterline
I.
Beaches and shores look different
depending on the water that hits them.
The little lakes and rivers are of my childhood,
the call of a loon in the afternoon
is clear when the boats are anchored and the men
drink Pabst Blue Ribbon around fire pits.
We dance and laugh outside in a way the forests had forgotten
that man was like to do. Instead of ceremonial pipes,
we smoke cigarettes.
The kids giggle, warm marshmallow stuck
to their lips and fingers. We make a game of
lighting the marshmallows on fire, running around the
circle of lawn chairs with their sweet, goopy torches.
No one stops us.
Some of the teenagers steal their uncles’ beer
only to spit it out after one tentative sip. It takes them three or four
squares of hershey’s chocolate to get the sour taste of
bitter age off of their tongues.
Above us are the stars, every single constellation
charted and logged long before we came along.
Bears, heroes, zodiac animals and demigods.
Someone looked at these distant balls
of fire and fusion and thought “spoon”.
They are bright enough that we can see their reflection in the
black water. The water so warm and friendly in the daytime,
now the younger kids eye it with fear and stay away from the shore.
II.
The oceans and great lakes are from
my adolescence, salt and big water
and cold. These waters don’t warm up until the summer is
almost over, August and September.
The girls I know go to school
four blocks from the curving shoreline of Lake Michigan.
We walk to the beach after class and kick the sand
even if the temperature is well below freezing.
The water does not freeze.
These are the days of tuna fish sandwiches,
tampons, peanut butter, inside jokes,
long plane rides and goodbyes.
Of expectations unmet and trips downtown.
There is uncertainty in the air, and I long
for the sickly sweet taste of a charred marshmallow.
But the water is cold, and it does not freeze.
III.
There is no water where I live now.
I suppose there is a river.
They say it is man-made, and
I think the creek knows it.
It is low and thin in some spots,
clogged with dark matter and styrofoam coffee cups in others.
It runs beneath the streets and sidewalks of campus,
and it is very easy to forget that it is there. Â
They call it “Boneyard Creek”
probably because the students have to keep
each other from falling into it in the month
before classes end. Maybe it speaks to
an older horror story.
But the creek is small, and I
miss the big water and the lakes
and the salt and the sand, even if the
sand is cold and numbs my toes.
You cannot get lost in a creek. Â
I have a friend who says she likes being able to see
the horizon with nothing but flat, cut land
between her and the sun as she drives.
The endless expanse of dirt does not make her skin crawl like it does mine,
when the only blue is overhead. Â
The sky is big here, and the constellations the same
