Bellied-up and whimpering about the eventuality
of being dead again at the Waterfront Restaurant
the evening of the Snow Moon which,
as you might imagine, is full and large, yet no larger
than its mass has been since before Tycho Brahe
eyeballed it against the backdrop of a strange star
in Cassiopeia, observing no parallax among the bodies
and concluding Aristotle’s celestial immutability axiom
was wrong; it’s a reflective gift the sun
brings itself to give us when it hits that plane.
I snap a picture of it above Ontario and the Trenton Channel.
The river is a vitrine displaying all the precious pieces
of the sky. It’s the offseason of the boats that clog the river,
of the leathered bodies that strafe themselves with sun.
The lights along the dock at the shuttered marina
spangle what can’t sit still, spangle rivulets
in darkness, spangle reflections of the water
in tall windows (when landlocked I prefer a half roundel
looking into an indistinct, unconstellated landscape)
of an empty restaurant whose grandeur could be missed
from the potted stretch of Jefferson one must drive
to get here, spangle blue eyes, this wine glass, spangle
because “coruscate” sounds too strange and arcane,
even for a poem of mine, spangle the water from Ontario
to here, from here to Ontario—I think of Jake Dimmick,
bass player and friend, over there in Leamington
and wonder at the few short miles, the incommensurate
international boundary between us, the floating
mechanisms (ferries, Jet Skis, and cabin boats)
that draw on Archimedes’ buoyancy principle to take us toward
and away from each other, the radio check-ins with the coast guard,
the nondescript white buoy that marks the border,
the phone my wife dropped from a boat in Lake Erie
last summer, I think of its final ping as I text her
a picture of the moon above the water, mathematical
in its recurrence, inevitable as our borrowed light.

Cal Freeman is the editor several publications; his writing has appeared in many journals; and his poems have been anthologized. He is a recipient of the Devine Poetry Fellowship (judged by Terrance Hayes), winner of Passages North’s Neutrino Prize, and a finalist for the River Styx International Poetry Prize. Born and raised in Detroit, he teaches at Oakland University and serves as Writer-In-Residence with InsideOut Literary Arts Detroit. His chapbook of poems, Yelping the Tegmine, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in June of 2024.