Meditation at Lake Michigan

On the yacht club’s docked steamliner, pop music,

streamers, and cocktails, and the pier’s 

stone planter where orange lilies and daffodils summer

alongside a flattened Marlboro pack,     

three boys cast and wait, hunched and smoking,

white shirts, wild hair, though nothing bites 

or even snags their interest. From somewhere,

country music, but it’s the windsong      

that dapples the water, and the sky, being sky,

blue and bird-speckled and barely 

noticed by a cabin cruiser that idles through, marina-bound,

swarmed in floral shorts and bikinis, koozies

and plastic champagne flutes. For a moment, it blocks

the view of the woman dangling her legs

off the pier. She’s eating cherry tomatoes and cheese,

a baguette fresh from the Washington St. market. 

Sunglasses on her head, she squints at the water,

how it shimmies, jointless, 

a regular rubato, improvising

with sun and moon, storms, the debris

of chapstick caps, Modelos floating in the far corners. 

Picture it and the woman who hails 

the Lake’s reticent, unflinching gaze,

that flashes and disappears

 like millions of iridescent scales. 

Behind her, the city barrels on.

Someone rides the L going nowhere 

but away. So, too, 

those distant, blurry outboards, beyond the jetty, 

faces aimed into the wind,

bows toward the waves, the onrush 

of this life, or into what it could be.

Everything asking to be spared

the deadness evident everywhere,

some pleasure, catch, or joyride. 

But that woman, pressing on for nothing less 

than to speak in the tongues

of water and sky and light, to babble and burn

a radiance absent except through these 

impossible and brimming bodies of ours.