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Cal Freeman was born and raised in West Detroit. He received his BA in Literature from University of Detroit Mercy and his MFA in poetry writing from Bowling Green State University. In 2004 Terrance Hayes selected him for the Devine Poetry Fellowship. His poems have appeared in such journals as Nimrod, Ninth Letter, Folio, Commonweal, The Journal, Drunken Boat, among others. He currently lives in Dearborn, MI with his wife, Sarah, and his stepson, Ethan. He teaches poetry and creative writing at Oakland University.-----------
While Looking at de L’Isle’s Map of Michigan on a Beer Label by Cal Freeman
Three cracked bells
on a mustard yellow rectangle,
an anchor and line, star of a compass,
eight points,
directional letters in French script.
I am on a back deck in Ludington, drinking,
drying shoes in the sun.
Yesterday I washed them in the waves
at the big lake. Blue running shoes
that have seen mostly walking,
never a run of more than five miles.
Paddles, a muskie, a black triangle of ink,
poor emblem of the blue spruce.
Sailboat, snow shoes
partially over-
laid, a sugar maple leaf,
a famous suspension bridge
between peninsulas,
a water skier about whom
I can imagine nothing.
My drinking, a state.
My drinking of the state,
the state, and I think
of the crisp glacier taste
of the well water I had
in Suttons Bay—
my uncle’s tap water
came from an underground stream
that ran beneath the Leelenau
Peninsula to the Grand Traverse Bay.
Once I drank a case of beer
while camping in Cadillac
and was drunk enough
during a massive thunderstorm
not to mind the lightning strikes
and gale force winds,
to admire the outline
of the birch, oak, maple
forest, the second-growth
trees like young horses
testing their legs with wind
on their backs, each time
the lightning came.
(I am guilty of conflating trees and
horses.)
I drank twelve Labbatts’
with a bear guide/taxidermist
in Ontonagon who managed
the house I rented.
He told me he wasn’t supposed
to drink on the job.
I said no one would know and we talked
about his daughter’s upcoming wedding,
the lack of need for taxidermists
in the upper peninsula.
No one had money, he said,
so did their own shoddy work.
He gave me his number in case
anyone I knew needed a bear guide.
The warbler that bent
the small sugar maple bough
as we shook hands
near the cabin door knew more
than I ever would, which was fine.
I said fine to myself, staggering
back inside. I thought of Gary Snyder’s
bear spirit reverie, how he woke
to realize he couldn’t hit a bear
in the ass with a handful
of berries,
then how Kevin Cantwell (or was it Cantwell
telling a story about Larry Levis?) couldn’t
hit a mill pond with a
handful of gravel.
Poets off the mark,
on another.
In the Porcupine Mountains
on my way back from a waterfall,
I pissed off
to the side of the trail
(a two-track clean on my way there)
when I saw fresh bear scat,
no bear,
but a pile of newly-digested berries
in the July sun.
I walked the half mile to my car
glancing back into the woods.
I grew up drinking chlorinated water
in Detroit and Stroh’s beer from cans,
a gold lion on the label.
The sound of cicadas in Northern
Michigan is the same
as the sound of streetlights
(I couldn’t hit a parked railroad car
with a stone from a distance
of five feet) in Detroit.
The Stroh’s emblem is gold on red;
it should bring to mind a city
stricken by Stroh’s, Vernors, General Motors,
Ford factories, Lear industrial
design centers leaving, white
residents (unrelated to riots
or other historical renderings
that blame black people for white
flight) leaving with their money, schools closing,
and still I have had many cases
of Stroh’s beer in that city
because my father used a red
and yellow cardboard case,
red and yellow like an oxeye
daisy, to store
his assortment of pipe wrenches
and screwdrivers, simple tools
with which he built our cat, Boccaccio,
a scratching post, with which he built
a desk where at three I swore
I had seen the Lord reading a book.
Small red ovals on either of my father’s shins
mark the mountainside in Italy
where he fell while bike riding
and looking at the moon,
the small oval of the Stroh’s lion
on the can (my father would allow me
a sip as a boy), my father
with his strange way of looking up
while riding, of giving cats inflated Roman names.
Do bears bark and bray terrifyingly?
I couldn’t hit a bear in the ass
with a handful of berries.
I couldn’t tell a white-breasted warbler
from a woodpecker outside of books.
The Lager of the Lakes label
is centered by an eighteenth century
French map titled “Lacs du Canada.”
The lower peninsula is an alligator’s
head and not a mitten, Lake Michigan
a little finger of beer.
This map is the beginning
of the state, long before it was
my state, or my father’s state,
long before it was my parents’ or my
uncle’s state. Before these French names
that signify extinction
and approximate points
on the backs of our left hands
began to tell us where we are.
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