When I pull onto Sunset Beach Road
in the purple twilight,
a couple is already standing entwined
in front of their truck,
tail lights pointed at Lake Michigan,
peering into the western sky;
I am not the only one who
thought to watch from the bay.
Do you see anything? they ask,
without preamble, as though
there is not a global pandemic, as though
it’s still normal to talk to strangers.
(Old habits die hard, we are
steeped in neighborliness borne of necessity
from years of Midwest winters,
I suppose.
Would the Ingalls have survived
without Mr. Edwards?)
Not yet, I say.
Underneath the just visible Ursa Major,
the wetlands are spread out like a feast:
mosquitoes, crickets, frogs,
bats and terns and herons,
muskrats, possums,
me.
For tonight’s music, we have just
the crickets, and the bullfrog’s call
like a plucked banjo string,
the same note over and over,
deep and slow.
The pale light from the just-gone sun
paints the marsh pools with quicksilver,
as though the thin skin of the earth
has been peeled back by the dirty thumb of a giant,
the cattails and the reeds,
the gravel trails, the jagged pines,
all torn away –
but instead of dirt and rock,
instead of fossils and magma,
there has always been light,
waiting for us
to shine.
So though we stand and squint and look up,
waiting for darkness to pool around us,
all I see,
and only when I look slightly askance,
is a smudge of light
across the deep blue brow
of the horizon,
like a holy mark
done in haste
by an indifferent thumb.
But we stand a little while longer
on the warm road,
pointing out
the faint streak to another watcher
who pulls up alongside us,
passing the light from one
to another, sharing light
out of our unwashed chalice
at the feast.
Halfway North 