HOW TO HAUNT THE BANK-OWNED HOMES OF DEARBORN, MI

“The hero at death is a seed dropped back into the furrow
he himself carved, splendor buried in the sillion. We are the fruit
of that seed, or we can be, if we seek the name of our own roots.”

—Dan Beachy-Quick

This interiority turned up
like a collar,
an aversion to sunlight
dots the park with parasols
bright as infant pupils.
The white around
the eye should not be white
but ought to resemble a skein of fat,
the toughened consequence of vision.

There are days muck-brown
and stagnant
when the mind feigns work
but recoils at the little veins
in the river’s mirror tributizing toxins.

You must visit the creek
that palms the reflection
and chisels eyes from
furrows of Tedrow loam.

Sight is ancient;
Its history looks through us
and registers well-meaning-looking
features
like weak messianic forces.

This thing looks at us
and sees us not see it
even when it is there.
A spectral asymmetry interrupts
here all specularity.
It de-synchronizes, it recalls
us to anachrony.
We will call this the visor effect:
we do not see who looks at us.

Tired fishers pull carp over
metal railings, and seagulls peck
garbage and bones from the asphalt
at Fish Hatchery Park.

The Rouge River
is a black Lincoln’s hood.

This river doesn’t flow.
It sits in its stink.
What happened to Edsel Ford
in 1943?

Edsel’s stomach burned
 a little at first, then excruciatingly,
until one morning
 he saw grey broodcombs in his cherry wood
table and blacked out.
 Any morsel, even water, sent pangs 
along the eroded wall.
The old man fed him
unpasteurized milk to treat
his “undulant fever”

(Once you said Edsel Ford
really died of cirrhosis;
he hated his father,
he loved booze and horses,
but he made damn sure
those airplanes rolled off of the line
way out here in Ypsi
where blue angels
do tricks in the sky).

Pace-setters dangled gloves
at their sides in silence
at the hour of his funeral.
An emaciated man
with a birdlike face cursed
flashbulbs and reporters as he stepped
from the dim of the cathedral
into the bright afternoon like a photograph
of his second,
less heroic self.

We found slender winter stoneflies
in Johnson Creek
and took it for an omen.

In Greenfield Village glass is blown
into ornamental shapes.
As my eyes and body
ache into the glare of water,
an anachronistic mill wheel slops
the sheen from rivulets.

Jim Sullivan wakens
yelling, “Strike. Strike.”
Walter Reuther
lies on the trestle bridge
at Miller Road,
a bandage wrapped around
his head.

You must find our grandmother.
She still lives inside that house
on Shenandoah Street,
laying down cards in an ongoing
game of solitaire, drinking
vodka from a coffee cup
labelled, “Justice.” Her face
wrinkled like a wet paper bag,
her chalky tongue rolling
under smoke, her breath
of alcohol and sand,
and ask her where the river
goes. To another river?
To the big lake eventually?

She shapes eyes
out of fluviatile loam.
She says we must squat
in bank-owned homes.
She says one must enter
history like flotsam.

The night Henry Ford died
the Rouge River flooded
after days of rain.
It knocked out power
to his mansion.
A single candle and a wood fire
at his death bed,
two final innovations.

The bank’s eyes are clean,
their pupils in the black.
The weight of the sheriff
leans against the door
loosening the latch.

Her smoke furls around
the body of the city.
The lamp’s shadow on the ceiling
yellow as her eye.

Eyes and body ache
into the glare of water.

The bungalows are boarded
up and padlocked
one by one.

HOW TO EXTIRPATE MUNICIPAL DEBT

Milkweed woven into chain link,
The signs of erstwhile gangs magisculed
Over tennis courts and brick.

A crude cash emblem,
A diadem on a star.

Pheasants in the poverty grass and poverty’s
Antecedents gritting teeth.

A threnody of un-spayed cats.

Apple cores, zero cores,
Emptiness cores, honey locust hanging
Over the garage in the rain

That falls yellow and reticular
As an old drunk’s face.

I am no longer dreaming of what
Will come.

I pick huckleberries like a sparrow;
I strip the nails
From broken stairs.

The fighting dogs are bleeding;
The soporific buses along the avenue hum.

Leave any noun to the elements
And it gets cored to its basest denotation.

Burnt rodent skull
Inside the pizza box,
Blue tarp over shingle-rot,

Mossed and scabrous, saplings
Growing in the gutter,
The street lights dark throughout the night like,

Fuck you. Nobody’s
Going to pay this down.

Cal Freeman was born and raised in West Detroit. He received his BA in Literature from University of Detroit Mercy and holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University. His poems have appeared in many journals including Commonweal, The Journal, Nimrod, Ninth Letter, Birmingham Poetry Review, The Paris-American, and Drunken Boat. He is the recipient of the Howard P. Walsh Award for Literature, the Ariel Poetry Prize, and the Devine Poetry Fellowship (judged by Terrance Hayes). He has also been nominated for Pushcart Prizes in poetry and creative nonfiction. He currently lives in Dearborn, MI and teaches at Oakland University.

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