My mother again, west Detroit again,
reciting Alfred Noyes into the night,
a baseball in the streetlight’s glow
with moths and bats, an aluminum bat’s ping,
a homonymical man, my father, John Calvin Freeman Jr.
drinking Eight O’Clock Bean Coffee purchased
from the A&P on Evergreen, swinging one-handed
at a tee set in the road. Later that night, Orville Redenbacher
popcorn hissing and percussing on the stove,
butter melting in a little pewter pan.
Basketball rim on the garage, canebrake
in the alley behind the cratering garage
sequestering bright berries crenulated
like rodent brains, diaphanous with beads of dew,
the slow accretions of prefixes and modifiers as
antehistorical, anteorbital nouns settle into their
terminal positions and shrug off their
burdensome sentences, the declensions they suggest—
rim, basketball rim, alley, alleyway, street,
streetlight. The cicada clipped by the shovel blade
as I dug into the alley’s Tedrow loam,
the crunch of its green body, the lesson
in the way it stilled, its annular arboreal song
cut off—to sing perpetually without sustenance
was its sentence and my wish. The Macintosh tree
in the next door neighbor’s yard, bees
in the overripe flesh of fallen fruit.
A little league teammate spotted standing at a bus stop
in the rain with his grandmother on their way
to those gravel baseball diamonds behind
the little Catholic church on Ford Road,
my mother regaling our catcher, Casey Philo,
with her rendition of “Casey at the Bat,”
the joy of a late-inning rally in Warrendale,
the joyless Mudville of the poem,
red mechanical pitching machine, the rattle of its shunt
as a tall man pops the handle to deliver a strike.
A recurring dream of that Dutch colonial
on Vaughan Street leveled during the lay
of Engler for another milkweed lot,
Vinnie Johnson’s last-second shot
against Portland, 1990, my father walking ahead
of my cousin and me toward Warren Avenue
with my sister on his shoulders,
the glut of muscle cars and drunks,
a threnody of honking horns, heads
sticking out of windows and sun roofs shouting,
“Baaaad Boooys!”
“The Beautiful American Word, Sure”
by Delmore Schwartz, a battered paperback
of Jim Carroll’s Living at the Movies, a chestnut mare
reined by a girl I used to know,
the story of that horse, “No Man’s Mare,”
impossibly written by Djuna Barnes,
in which the mare, captured and burdened
with a slender woman’s corpse, must gallop
into the sea at high tide or suffer
the humiliation of the living, social being,
an enactment of what Camus called
the only serious philosophical question.
The 90s, the suicides of Kurt Cobain
and Doug Hopkins. Molly Bloom’s
soliloquy punctuated by its string of yesses.
That line from Borges’ “The Library of Babel”—
To speak is to fall into tautology,
which I take to mean the story of our story
is the only story we can tell while we
encrypt the details of our lives. The Wolf Man’s
Magic Word, the water passage in Ithaca in Ulysses—
What in water did Bloom, waterlover,
drawer of water, watercarrier returning
to the range admire? Grosse Ile
where it looks across the strait to Amherstburg,
Grosse Ile where it looks across
The Trenton Channel to the defunct
McLouth Steel plant, setting sun
peeking through chipped-out isosceles of glass,
the Fermi cooling towers as seen from
Gibraltar Bay, the Fermi cooling towers
as seen from the beach at Brest Bay at Sterling State Park.
Gil Scott Heron’s “We Almost Lost Detroit,”
Nirvana’s “All Apologies,” Larry Larson
singing “The Fields of Athenry”
in an Irish bar in Corktown, Joni Mitchell’s
“The Last Time I Saw Richard,” this poem
some dark café where I’m fatefully boring someone.
To capture the way the black knee socks
on a bay stallion looked in a paddock
at Rushlow’s Arabians Farm, the sadness
of a barn on an August afternoon
brought on by the knowledge that these long
summer days would not go on forever,
strands of orange fly tape hanging in the hay loft,
desiccated blue bottles stuck to them,
great oak towering above the farmhouse, tire swing
hanging from a sturdy branch by a cattle rope.
Father Justin Kelly reciting “The Wreck of the Deutschland”
in that musty lecture hall at Livernois and Six Mile.
Holding Sarah Pazur’s hand as, rapt, we listen.

Cal Freeman (he/him) is the author of the books Fight Songs (Eyewear 2017), Poolside at theDearborn Inn (R&R Press 2022), and The Weather of Our Names (Cornerstone Press 2025). His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals, including Atticus Review, Image, The Poetry Review, Verse Daily, The Indianapolis Review, North American Review, Willow Springs,Oxford American, Berkeley Poetry Review, and Advanced Leisure. He is a recipient of the Devine Poetry Fellowship (judged by Terrance Hayes), winner of Passages North’s Neutrino Prize, and a finalist for the River Styx International Poetry Prize. He teaches at Oakland University and serves as Writer-In-Residence with InsideOut Literary Arts Detroit.

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