Finished a draft of a sestina, talked to Michael Lauchlan,
and tried to outthink a fly in my living room,
swatting downward with a magazine.
The carcass either grew mysteriously small or there was no carcass.
A fly in hiding can still be a fly.
A hiding fly—bluebottle, greenbottle, or horse—can still
to the point of disappearance.
“There are scalloped edges
to what we dream up,” Michael had said.
This is typographical and psycho-phenomenal.
Stuck with enjoying ourselves
in June, in June’s jejune merriment
(the kids are out, the pools open),
we have to remind ourselves
Livonia is a place so dull that the quotidian
passes for crisis. Every cop-befriending fantasy, any certain way of feeling,
is driven by amnesty’s imprecise promise
like a floodlight angled into the situationally forgetful dark.
That floodlight, with its steel humerus for aiming,
keeps coming up for the troubling connection
it evokes between illumination and violence,
physiognomy and the perduring carceral threat.
Lauchlan said the epiphanic can grab us by the throat,
said nobody does imprecation like Pound;
nobody speaks of character with less remorse.
I’ve lost track of how much of my conversation with Lauchlan
has spilled into this, which is really meant
to take place at a municipal pool.
*
“We’re all going to Vittorio’s,”
my father said in the dream last night. I texted Uncle Victor
and mentioned it,
but he was unaware of these plans
to gather at his yellow colonial
on that island in the river.
Had I seen Van Eyck’s Annunciation?
Michael Lauchlan wanted to know.
She hadn’t originally been on canvas
but was transferred, remaining third
of a lost triptych, wood panel crumbling
beneath cerulean oils, to preserve her.
Preserve her! Make a few phone calls
to our closest friends.
We’re going to Vittorio Veneto
where the Austro-Hungarian army
met its fate to see The Madonna
by Sansovino. Even in sleep, I knew it wasn’t true.
We were headed to Grosse Ile
to see Uncle Victor pour chianti
from a Waterford decanter and pillory
what he loosely called “the world.”
“It will take the titanism of Vittorio Alfieri,
that poet herald of freedom…”
Why reduce the crooked
tunnel of trees to an emblem of serenity?
He thinks I may’ve killed my father
by asking for his old desk copies,
big chipboard editions,
which were left in my mailbox with a note,
Emergenza seemed a contronym upon waking.
Now my father is un-booked and waiting for a train,
and I’m pretending to drink iced tea
(I filled the bottle with Canadian whiskey from home)
in a cheap lounge chair where a superfluous
German Shepherd works the chain link perimeter
of the Botsford Pool.
Every scrap in the blanched lawn is tinder.
Oblivious of history and loss,
the dog days go on without precipitation
to wring the
sense from things.
by Cal Freeman
Cal Freeman (he/him) is the author of the books Fight Songs, Poolside at the Dearborn Inn, and The Weather of Our Names (Cornerstone Press 2025). His writing can be found in many publications, including The Glacier, Berkeley Poetry Review, and North American Review.
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