loons (or “another name-dropping, poetry-pondering, male-gaze michigan poem”)

by John Repp

Loons at Hubscher’s? On the grassy water?

Hidden in the poplar tangle along X-Mile Road,

behind which one swam or stood nude in the flat

Michigan heat? It wasn’t my idea of a sandwash,

having lifelong known the word to mean white,

crystalline hills ringing blue water cold enough

to numb no matter how inhuman the summer,

not the acre of clogged water, snails & black leeches

beloved by morel-exalting back-to-the-landers

glugging goat’s milk from pickle jars on a wedge

of un-sand. I did my best to fit in. I listened hard

& stripped at the right times, worked to grok

the squashed vowels & absent irony. Sad to say

& despite many bar-tales & songs, Hubscher’s sat

too far south for the loons that night-haunted

the poems everyone mimeographed & grooved on,

poems crammed with smelt, white pine, the summer

of 1967, Al Kaline, The Upper, iron ore, Sleeping Bear,

the smugness infecting everything Out East, elk,

auto factories, sturgeon. Ah, Phil Levine’s adoration

of Keats & the Spanish anarchists! Elizabeth Kerlikowske’s

funky Kalamazoo! Grouse & pheasant if we’re talking

Jim Harrison, songbirds if Keith Taylor! Ah, Jim Daniels’

smoked-glass goggles, Judith Minty’s Yellow Dog,

Robert Hayden’s can’t-be-better-said! But I’ll

nevertheless go on saying what can’t be said without

humming Michigan’s cartographic melody “X-Mile Road,”

especially as I remember Darleen undoing two shreds

of woven red, bedazzling thereby Thomas one

blast-furnace, naked-hippie Sunday. As he re-told

his undoing thirty years later, I inhaled the 1979 aroma

of Darleen as she set on the bar the perch platter & beer

on which I splurged every other Friday, Regina’s lawn cut,

Gerry’s cordwood split & ah, the night before Darleen

stood slick in the sun, didn’t I drive out past midnight

with Jan’s neurotic Doberman? Didn’t I bob & gurgle

& twist my feet in the cool Hubscher’s muck till the dog

pawed welts on my chest as I flailed neck-deep

in the tepid water? We all know the answer, but not

as deeply as Eric Torgersen—wry, precise understater—

who did & does the sublime music of loons the honor

of leaving it unspoken, yet their lonesome loonnness

does live in a few books in nooks, especially the fire-lit

cranny to my right. Solitude is a feast, invisible birds

coaxing to the tongue the most scrumptious syllables.

Photo of John Repp

BIO: John Repp is a writer, folk photographer, and digital collagist living in Erie, Pennsylvania. Sheila-Na-Gig Editions published his most recent book, Never Far from the Egg Harbor Ice House.