Lake Michigan: A Study in Violence
Waiting and watching the breakers crash and
strange rogues running across the incoming whitecaps,
waiting to see the violence multiply over these odd angles.
The colliding waves rise to an unnatural peak —
skirting the bounds of unreason —
and then bring foils of lily-white violence
down into the grey-blue-green.
Jagged, fluid, and dangerous
is the great lake in cold December.
Indeed, there is violence enough without the waves;
quiet, patient violence;
violence that seeps in and stills the beating heart
by little more than a breath, a touch:
a distant reminder of the frigid vacuum of interstellar space,
or the void.
When the day comes calmly, the hypothermic water is violence enough
to make one watch and wonder
upon such seeming contempt for the hide of a human.
For many it is unnamable.
They look and see the unending procession of rolling whitewater
to the sandy beach and call it beauty, alone.
A beauty that stands in a picturesque, and
not altogether a reminder of an incongruity with the human outfit,
and time —
apparently static in its rush to the shore.
They know, only as the human animal knows,
but do not see with their mind’s eye
the fathoms of volatility there reaching back to a stuff of the past
that is both terrible and integral to the fabric of life.
It is manifold beyond a privation of heat against a privation of cold, and
beyond the time of year and the whims of the winds draw.
There is something much deeper about.
And the seagulls alight momentarily
in the steadier ebbings between the wave crests.
There is no rest on these waters and they satisfy
themselves to hunt near the shores,
crowding the beaches, awaiting easier days.
Though December is only a kind of beginning,
for the lives of these birds once born of the sea are here
hinged upon this so massive of an inland lake
and it’s perfect indifference:
a cosmogony that can be guffawed at only by those
who have scarcely considered
that deep primordial darkness overhead.
