15 Counties Above the Bridge

• ONE: Alger
• TWO: Baragea
• THREE: Chippewa
• FOUR: Delta
• FIVE: Dickinson
• SIX: Gogebic
• SEVEN: Houghton
• EIGHT: Iron
• NINE: Keeweenaw
• TEN: Luca
• ELEVEN: Mackinac
• TWELVE: Marquette
• THIRTEEN: Menominee
• FOURTEEN: Ontonagon
• FIFTEEN: Schoolcraft

Hemingway, You Old Bear

Knots: A Theory

The Lady I Cannot Have

Autumn, South of Dodge [The Short Version]

Motorheads

Nevada

Perestroika

Yooper Song: Summer Solstace

ONE: Alger

Da weasel
By da beaver dam
Iss white, eh.
No snow on ground,
I’m mont’ late for
Brookie spawning,
Da weather mont’ late,
Both da weasel and me trapped
By Mom Nat’s obstinacy
Keeping her own
Bloody schedule.

TWO: Baraga

Walking down
A sinewy trail
Of tag alders
South of Big Erick’s,
A big bear and I come
Nose to nose,
No room to get by.
Physical impasse.
We both retreat,
Disgruntled
By externally
Dictated
Changes in plans.

THREE: Chippewa

At the old graveyard
Above Bay Mills
Among decaying spirit houses
Their roofs covered with gray moss,
My keys locked
In the gray Camaro.
An Ojibwa woman
Pulls up, three kids beside
Her in the rusty pickup.
I ask her to call the Tribal
Police, tell them I need help.
Four hours later I am still there,
Perhaps some old scars
heal slowly.

FOUR: Delta

Standing on bed rock
In the Upper Fishdam
Blackflies crawling
all over me,
I try techniques
Taught long ago
In survival
Training,
How to send my mind
Elsewhere
When
Interrogators
Torture you
For information.
Now, as then,
It  fails to work.

FIVE: Dickinson

I stand like the day’s
Last mass transit commuter,
Resigned to waiting
For the last hatch at dusk
Below Piers Gorge
Where water succumbs
To gravity,
boiling white.
Earlier an eagle
Swooped low
over the water
Surrounded
by small birds,
One of them sitting
on the eagle’s back
Stealing a ride,
A game, I think.

SIX: Gogebic

Far-From-Nothing-
Creek, a place
An old Finn
Described to me
When we both
Had drunk too much
Kesslers.
It yielded brookies
Every cast,
Just the way
He claimed.

SEVEN: Houghton

Sitting in a hotel overlooking
The shipping canal,
An old man tells me
How his father used to get
His brothers and him up
The morning after a snowstorm,
Showshoe them all into the bush
Looking for mounds of snow
With steam tendrils,
There being deer at rest beneath
The snow.
Shot eight one morning, he says,
Had to clean the blood trails
In case the game warden come along, eh?
He knocked back a rye whiskey
Went back to his grandaughter’s
Wedding reception.

EIGHT: Iron

A golden gray wolf near Iron River
Stops in a field at midday
In bright sun, stares at us.
A second wolf, black and sinister
Darts along a hedgerow.
At the end
of the pasture
Cows huddled
Against a fence,
quaking with fear.

NINE: Keeweenaw

“Can’t catch dose trouts
In dis drought, eh?”
The locals
Carp away.
I don’t tell them of
French Annie Creek,
Bumping a worm
Along the cobble bottom
Beneath sweepers,
Catching my limit
Of keepers
In an hour.

TEN: Luce

I decide I won’t blame old
Ernie for stealing the name
Of the Two-Hearted
And fishing elsewhere.
All morning I have
Been shouldering my way
Through jungle, using
My flyrod to open paths
While blackflies
Swarm,
My headnet in the truck
Three miles away
Under two weeks of
flotsam and jetsam.
This is fun?

ELEVEN: Mackinac

Within sight
Of I-75 pods
Of pinks gather
On redds
Not in an odd year
But even.
Until recently
Such timing
Considered odd
Odd among
The test-tube crowd.

TWELVE: Marquette

On the Escanaba
Three young badgers
Play roughly in the grass
Until one of them
Tumbles into the current,
Swims frantically while
The others run the bank
Squeaking, put down the
Trout that was rising there.
Just before dark a bear
Paddled across the river,
Clambered up a beaver slide.
Shook and melted into
The tag alders

THIRTEEN: Menominee

I squat on a boulder
Watching sturgeon
Swirl in the mud flat
Below,
The females
Taking two decades
To mature,
Mating once
Every four to six years,
Not unlike some women
I’ve known,
Biblically.

FOURTEEN: Ontonagon

Having
Bushwhacked
Down
the MibraOnty
At noon, the air
Kicking blazes
At 96,
I shed my duds
Fish au naturel,
Working my way from
Rock to rock.
Use hooks’ shanks
To shake brookies
Back into the river
Never touching them.

FIFTEEN: Schoolcraft

The sign is hand-made, crude:
GAS, SNACKS, AMMO, BAIT,
FRESH MILK, ICE CREAM, FLIES,
That last word
snagging my attention.
They are in a chipped
Brown crock,
& dusted over.
I ask a woman
with a gray hair-helmet
What they are.
“Dunno, hon. They come with the place
When we bought it and moved
Up from Roseville.

The Rule of Four
(or is it Three?)
Eludes me on rivers.

I am forever
Undershot or overheaved,
Mostly hung high
Among
Branches & sweepers.

Blinded by my hat brim,
I create knots & tangles
Elegant enough to
Challenge
Physicists in good standing.

I want Einstein
Out here with me,
Point to the mess
Suspended
Over our heads,
Tell him, “Man, Al,
Explain that!

Grin at his bug-eyed,
Jaw scratching,
Ask him if it could be
I casted
Into a time warp
Relatively
speaking,
One human second
Equals one insect-year,
Time enough
For unseen demons
To tie my lines
Into intricate knots
Insoluble,
Even to his silent
genius.

My heart races, a lump
Forming in my throat like a clot,
Cold sweat beading on the back of my neck,
This thrill
Of an unexpected encounter
With a haunting beauty
my gut tells me is too good
For the likes of a black Irishman
Spawned by river rats from New York
And Mississippi,
I am left to stare open-mouthed like a fool,
my brain swollen with competing words,
no sound coming forth.

I stand mute,
stupid before her lines,
The lustrous sheen of her flesh,
A golden hue
Suggesting a life in the sun
Along a river laden with
Frangiapani by a god
using the palette of a rainbow.

There is something both strong
And delicate about her,
How she might bend in the wind,
Resisting the weight of life
Or go with it, her choice and nature.
I imagine her born
Of the purest mating
Of imagination and passion
Nurtured carefully,
Shaped to become
What I see and cannot have,
My heart telling me
This beauty shall never
Feel my touch
For I am a hopeless flailer,
A flap-dashing pretender on rivers
Unworthy of this cane lady.

She declared,“I seen me
the Queen of the Englanders
Once, over to the Soo,
And she weren’t no skank.
If I get off to sleep, don’t be fearin’
I can’t find my way back to the shack, eh.
I done that trail solo many a night
And couldn’t say I’d a wanted it
Any other way.
I been alone in crowds,
And mostly I don’t like no numbers
Over the sum of two,
So if you’re interested
In somethin’
More than seein’ night-sights
And poundin down shooters,
And I was you,
This might be the time
To be declarin’
Your intentions
In words a girl
Can’t get mixed up
In her whisky.”

Gentlemen don’t talk out of school,
So let’s leave it at this:
I confess to a weakness
For long-legged women
In red dancing shoes
Who can cast a fly
To a sou,
And wing-shoot like
Cupid.

We stare at the Sierras topped with spring snow,
the high desert the color of British khaki, something
made by mud daubers.

We come to bury Dillon Thomas, a poet’s name,
he was only five, trapped in an unforgiving body
requiring an adult coffin.
He lies in a Victorian house, dark and compressed,
cluttered with cowboy regalia, a saddle and sidearm.
A bamboo flyrod and wicker creel stand in the corner,
things the boy will never use to catch trout or words to
make into poems.

God does not practice catch-and-release.

Male California quail strut between brush piles,
puffing their electric blue breasts across the street
from a Latino biker bar while magpies flit from tree to tree
yakking anxiously, black and white, life adjacent to death.
A biker by the curb sees me, uses his beer bottle
to make the sign of the cross.

The priest stands in the walled children’s section of the graveyard,
announces when he goes Home he will reside in a row
of priests, pointing with his hand. My brother Jim, the park ranger says, “Yeah, right next to the kids.”

Back in my room in the Atlantis
I stare at the bedspread and curtains,
orange and blue fish on pink,
the color of Pepto-Bismol beyond expiration.
Bad taste on a bad day.

I am dogged by fish I can’t catch,
funerals I can’t prevent.

We Moscow shuffle
Along thirty-foot-wide sidewalks
Sidewindering through December snow
Shoulder to shoulder comrades
Our hot feet making mocha
Moving like lemmings
Toward the Metro,
Great holes in the ground
wrought by Uncle Joe,
Another week of work-slash-chaos
Ending as it began, absent color
Or purpose, few lights,
No talking, a cough now and then
Millions of feet scuffle-shushing
In unison if not cadence,
Black coats and shapkas
Tendrils of breath rising off us to mix
With sweat fumes, tobacco.

At the New Cemetery
Outside the walls of Novodevichy
I see The Moscow Hills
looming above the river
An oxbow, of course
Not yet iced shut,
To be investigated
For fish.
An old man in baggy brown pants
Has a fiberglass pole in a sand spike
Sits on a bucket, smoking with the
Delicate gesture that marks a Russian.
Behind us clots of soldiers
in pea green and red take guided tours
of hallowed grounds, young men
with pimply faces and blank stares
patent leather belts, no weapons,
their black boots thick-soled and clunky.
The old man
says Amerikansky?
I ask about the soldiers taking tours
He says, “Raisa, she gets them ready
For Democracy.” He takes a puff, expectorates,
“The Church told Stalin everything,
Was a home to kah-geh-beh, en-keh-veh-deh
The crazy Reds, da?”

Outside the Praga
A restaurant only in name
Masses mass to stare
At the cathedral of commerce
State-run eatery filled with generals
Bowls of Beluga, sweet wines
Medals clinking as counterpoint to ice in drinks
While young blonde women in faux
Alligator miniskirts mingle,
Flexing their iron glutes like adverts.
One called Marissa leaves a general with
Red shoulder boards
Asks me if she can sell me a cure for cancer
And when I decline
Offers herself,
A temporary cure for being alone
In the Evil Empire.
A night of socialist fraternity?
She says “A night of socialist sex
ees not so different, I think
Than democratic sex.
A carton of Marlboros is
Customary – a tip, Da?
 Love-making is free.”