Michigan Driftwood Man

Now, I’ve watched this inland sea breathe
for years, the boundary gash at its side
glimmer and ice. Hanged every night.
Autumn puckers honey horizon lips
and always winter seals them with
a kiss, silk skimmings of frothed milk.

The waters incantate like worshippers
of the Great Tree (the backbone spearing me
in place). Even before moon’s seducing
grace convinced them of spells superior
to mine, I was losing their crests and tides
my gospels the fossils that sank in time.

I am not a fossil, though I recall like one.
I, Man schemed into construction. A shaft
of white pine my thigh, pale knotted
birch my fingers, toes, and the curve
of my eyes. Bones bark and red oak,
my ribs clawed insides of shipwrecks-

who so feared the lake, he nailed me
at its wake, to guard it’s sin? Here
Chicago’s industry I see, the burning hum
of Indiana farms. Up north I hear
ghosts tinker, plinks of copper underground
and I want the children to come and play,

instead I watch them drown.
Once I held a sea creature’s fossil
in my hand. Heavier than a heart. Once
I held the fossil of a human child, you
are surprised to know that it was so slight
it floated off my palm, see-through in light.

The dunes migrate with the birds, both
languages I’ve lost. I once could auger,
from retreating moorhen flocks, the future,
now my own discontent intones past. Wind
whispers veins and feigns my pulse through
flotsam limbs. In morning piping plovers

prattle at my knee, trade gossip for lulls,
wounds for psalmed palmistry. My disbelief.
In spring new birds will come to pick
the remnant skin of shore; widgeons,
teals, geese, mergansers. I am Man’s
monument, but it is Her, unbound, who

soothes the empty space of my dogwood lungs
where air screams to be a dermis. At night
the horizon melts and half-evolved calls
crawl from the murk- humans, you have not worked
enough, not manufactured fast enough
your noise to stem this malcontent.

You think yourselves concentrated,
Christ’s galaxy under each fingernail.
Would you believe I’m the only line here
tugging your hollow hummingbird bodies
away from the surface? I’ve metamorphed
to fit every age, saving you this way.

But now, I notice there is something wrong.
It is summer, and death is not quite gone.
Fish throat-purged are plucked to dry at my feet,
A cormorant, like feathered tar, litters
the shore. Ribs torn apart, gizzard exposed;
a cat matted mossy brown and wet, curled

sinking in the sand’s lifeless gulp;
and a creature large, domestic,
the water nodding its head up and down.
I can’t bear to look at them, thusia
for agitator obscured, furrowing
freshwater like a scar. I wait, silent.

Dark sails in, a phantom glacier
stilling sky, confounding lair and lakeside.
I hear Her take a breath. Then, something steps
from the inland sea. Toward me. Hung
as I am, I can do nothing
as the dead are pulled slow across the sand
returned slow to Lake Michigan.

***

Zachary Dankert is an emerging poet who studied English and Biology at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. His poetry can be found in Breakbread Magazine, South Florida Poetry Journal, and The Fourth River, among others.