for the tricentennial

In the evening, out on Belle Isle
when the forest floor expires a moisture
from the warmth of the day
(more like late May than anytime in April)
and laces a fine haze among the newest saplings,
a family of albino deer quit their hiding
to graze the gray-brown mulch for something
proper to eat. Behind the little one
the sun lays down across the island and backlights
the unusually shaggy hides of these strange creatures.
“Is that a goat?” someone might ask
from within the car as it slows
to observe their foraging habits.
Mild and mythical like a goat,
but as mysterious as an ordinary deer
in the northern woods of Michigan,
the little one looks up in the rear-view mirror
to notice his family has already crossed
the narrow lane for greener, perhaps more quiet pastures.

The low band of haze continues through the woods
to the ends of the island lined with parking lots
where a few eager barbequers char the day's remains
just so the savor of burning fat might cling
to their jackets before packing the empty igloo
with the last of the lighter fluid
to head home for the night.
Fishermen and sportsmen ring the island
in speedboats and sailboats and watch
the Canadian Club lights go on
before they're darkened again by a passing freighter
loaded down with sand and crushed limestone
or unrolled steel from Kazakhstan.
Downriver, ores and polymers from the ends of the earth
converge on River Rouge
only to emerge in a Lincoln on Jefferson Avenue
idling in front of Sheena's party store.
The hum and tong of a tool and die
have long been silenced by the cricket's song
or the blizzard of fishflies climbing a light pole
among the ruins of the east side in early July.
The river flows past notches and slips
of the old Chrysler plant, remarkable
for the consistency of blue,
especially considering the turbid waters of its source:
Lake St. Clair, a tiny bladder of the Great Lakes
where the waters are delayed for a few days
before heading off to Cleveland
and eventually to sea.

In the late spring when the trees have thickened enough
to cover the bungalows dotting the east side
and give shade to the estates along Windmill Point,
it's possible, from the right angle,
perhaps with your left eye closed,
to picture the placid banks of the Detroit River
and the well-disposed forests and groves
reaching inland to a pristine wilderness
as Cadillac and his men might have seen them
paddling up the straights of a northern paradise.
Perhaps not. Memory is no more than an impression,
neither wholly true nor false, but always partially so.
And a memory never loved or hated
will eventually fade
unless the mind is startled to recognition:
Why did I ever go?
To say that I wouldn't be where I am
unless it was so
is to presume to know that where I am
is better than the room where I would go
tonight had I decided never to leave.
Never to leave and never to have seen
the lights of the yacht club stretch out to Canada
in the black waters of the river.
Never to have heard the distant
backbeat of a familiar music, the lonely clang
of rigging against the masts of the boats at anchor.
Never to have known that what I understood
I no longer understand:
home again to an old friend's wedding,
the only one left in town.