Convinces me it’s raining for a moment
as I look out the library window
to watch the honey locust leaves,
yellow like the sky through tinted glass,
yellow like the bilirubin
in cirrhotic skin, peel off in gusts
of wind.
What we’re trained to think of
as intractable is mostly weather.
Various substances and clippers
have turned against me,
northeasterly this time of year,
it’s overcast among the living
and cooler for now and I’m happy
to wear this musty blue fleece
that belonged to my late father.
I don’t do enough thinking
in this place of thinking.
The routes between the buildings
are indirect and slow, the architecture
inchoate, a bricolage
of nonsense,
a stone tower here, there
a neo-Tudor mansion rising from a sandhill
to peek over a scrub oak forest.
Soon enough, I mutter, imagining snow
caps on the bronze figures:
pained and exalted,
a mother caresses her haloed son;
a tall figure in a Cossack kneels
in prayer; nude Temptation stares
into the western distance. My car
rusts in the lot down the hill,
in that valley where mist refuses
to disperse, making cliché specters
of the leaves. I zip the collar of my fleece,
though I am not cold or wet.
Were I bronze matter anchored
to that granite basin, saint
in the year’s last spumes timed
to comfort the sin-eaters at their lunch,
I could metabolize my own
proclivities and get this crooked frame
into a pose of normalcy, but as it is,
there’s a place I know on Franklin Road
where one can sit beneath a corrugated awning,
drinking whiskey pickle backs
with pilsner to while away imaginary rain.
Cal Freeman (he/him) is the music editor of The Museum of Americana: A Literary Review and author of the books Fight Songs (Eyewear 2017) and Poolside at the Dearborn Inn (R&R Press 2022). His writing has appeared in many journals including Atticus Review, Image, The Poetry Review, Verse Daily, Under a Warm Green Linden, North American Review, The Moth, Oxford American, River Styx, 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. Born and raised in Detroit, he teaches at Oakland University and serves as Writer-In-Residence with InsideOut Literary Arts Detroit. His chapbook of poems, Yelping the Tegmine, has just been released.