Memory and Michigan

Memory and Michigan

Remembering where I’ve never been
the distance now makes memory so
dreaming like I dream these days
of that place in the summer
Empire, MI - our Empire
we built out of beach fires, friends, sand
empty beer cans
it’s all there etc, etc
clearer than our talks and laughs
all there in its best light.

Coming from the north
shooting across the night sky
whiter than the moon
hanging just above the dune
the night of the Solstice in June...
Remembering like this is blinding.
    songs by legendary fires,                  
    songs in the woods
    (you more whistling
    because you’re always bashful like that -
    even when it’s just me -
    and I howling to the sky
    up tree trunks to below the brush
    singing morels to me)
    “Like gold, fungi gold,”
    you glow
    “They taste as sweet as the forest!”
I can still see the look on your face
among the wreckage of memory
like trilliums scattered
fragments across a deep green forest floor
when was the last time
we built such an empire? you wonder.

The sound of sand blowing across sand
is the sound of nothing.
You know, the pictures are there:
digitized, hard-drived, memorized
burnt in like cigarette spots on the beach
at the end of the night.
We wrote this story before
although I can’t quite remember
how it goes.