Cal Freeman

Words for Port Austin

The waxing crescent moon’s an open paren within which any anecdote might fit.
You think you’re thinking but those mechanisms are gummed like the orb weaver’s ticks.
This cloying sense of the real we measure every experience against, the blue bird and the swan
in the back dune swale do not seem real.
I get an email from the writer RS Deeren. He grew up in Caro, Michigan and said he never really
saw anyone else writing about Michigan’s Thumb but told me he had swum
in the Pinnebog River and eaten ice cream on the windward coast of Grindstone as a boy.
I tell him I hiked the trail behind The Buccaneer Den this morning. Its dusty windows
are peppered with “No Parking” and “No Trespassing” signs.
One of the few extant Yelp reviews of the place comes from Jennie S
and reads, “The elderly workers were rude and did not want us there.
They actually made us get our own menu off someone's table (yes, while they were eating).
The elderly bar tender spilled my drink, bringing it to me half-full.
I was sitting at the bar not a table. Didn't offer to refill it. I asked several other questions
about Port Austin and apparently I was bothering them.”
This used to be a supper club, and in the afternoon fishermen would bring their catches
to sell or have them cleaned and fried on site.
The pin oaks have ampersands for leaves and roots that go on and on in polysyndeton.
This afternoon I watched a tractor uproot jet ski lifts from shallow water.
It marked the end of a season that never really was.
I snap a picture on my phone and caption it, You can’t see the lights
of Standish from a beach head in Port Austin because there are no lights
in Standish. It only becomes a beach head
if we think of dusk as a militaristic advance. Crows at the shoreline, or maybe grackles,
a swan so white and hyperreal against the blue it looks ornamental.
I refuse to say the swan’s a trumpeter; it sounds political, and, like you, I’m taking dictates from
a plurality of morons who look for blazons of sun on water, which I also do, who comment on
the breadth of the beach this year, which I also do. The water is low, and we have ten extra feet
of sand. I won’t say, All littorals are false, for fear of where the metaphor might go.
The beach is an obscene place, and no obscenity can be construed as false.
The glistening breadth of sand, the high-water scum of last year’s flotsam before the seawall,
a man blowing hopelessly into a pair of water wings (once I realized nothing had ever been
innocent I kept on writing about what had yet to happen to the self in a notational,
atemporal parenthetical I hadn’t planned on including). I won’t say I have heroes,
but if I did, they would be writing Sleepless Nights and quoting Aeschylus.
Somebody should buy the Buccaneer and rehab it, fix up the motel,
the scummed and scabbed pool. Bring up singers from Detroit every weekend
how they used to. I watch a girl take a large plastic shovel to a mound of sand and shape it
into the likeness of a castle. Moon in a daytime sky, tombolo stand
of paper birches bayed at by the bay, a reflection the tide-less weight of here won’t close.