A SWIM

Photo by Kristi Jacobsen

A SWIM

(For Philip Levine* and the Polish lass) 

Barely knew you from the nuts and bolts:

touching car parts is no match to feeling

your limbs as they simmer downstream

among the river’s effluvium. In this heat,

what does it cost me to float with dead fish?

I even like the taste of rust from stolen bikes. 

Soon, the shimmer of sunset on melted snow

will make a magical beach out of this debris,

even the oil slick from the plant’s sewage

cannot make the sand any darker, coarser.

We are the river’s hostages, but she is ours;

everything else is owned and spoken for. 

On a warm spring day like today, we swim

away from a horde of upstream fears, pains

washed from the factory’s stygian bowels.

Like runaway children, we dive deep, drink

a cocktail of filth maybe, but so bloody what?

Aren’t we happy? Aren’t we free? Aren’t we? 

Sundown and the plant’s call for a change

of shift force us back to a beach we dare

not crawl on however fevered our desire

has become. Oh, absently, we took our time

in the river, lost what frenzied dreams we

would have had. We must go back to work. 

---Albert B. Casuga

08-10-11

*Philip Levine is the newly appointed U.S. Poet Laureate

We stripped in the first warm spring night /and ran down into the Detroit River/to baptize ourselves in the brine /of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles, /melted snow./...Back panting/to the gray coarse beach we didn’t dare/fall on, the damp piles of clothes, /and dressing side by side in silence /to go back where we came from.---— From “Belle Isle, 1949,” by Philip Levine, They Feed The Lion and the Names of the Lost, (Alfred A. Knopf, 1999).