The Weight of Lake Superior

(October 2022. Written at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, an absolutely gorgeous spot in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. My last stop of the wonderful eastward Odyssey of Fall 2022, after completing 48 states in Wisconsin. After this I got in the bus to zoom back to Massachusetts.)

The weight of Lake Superior falls
deepest toward the south shore, because
of the shape of things, and the shape of
emptiness of what was and what fill will be,
because volcanoes and glaciers exhale,
because the map shapes out as it shakes out
through the edges of the sweating earth

and I want to take your hand in mine and
run our hands as one along Pictured Rocks
rough layered sedimentary poetry,
hundreds of feet of millennial experience,
feeling the contours of reality behind the face of the story.

I want us to see the way
the world works
and widens.