1.
Mitten shaped, this preposition falls
like a sandbar. With each rest of breath
we taste a slow verbal, a slow and winding change
in weather. The surface of the peninsula is
simply level, broken and glacial
and between these moraines we are howling
our minor chords for the broken hearted and the
nonchalant. We are hundreds of feet high.

2.
Our rhymes are sullen but green with kale
and okra. Our rhymes are simple
but divided by water on all sides.
The biggest portion of the state is an idea
that together we can sustain ourselves.
With wells and trails to lines of pole beans,
we mean to deliver a fiddle tune at dusk.

3.
Just west of this there are words and pastorals
and children who come for the summer to signify
that which they were previously unable.
They come and sing and on the shores
of our closest lake they are like hunting animals
without instinct. The highest point of the lowest peninsula
does not settle down. Our kinship
and the quiet sensuality of water touching sand
does not change and does not ever settle down.

4.
The lowest point is friends with Lake Erie
and is losing the ones we love to leave with in the fall.
The geographic direction of peninsulas is a definition of distraction
and a good example of deconstruction.
Ironwood, in the superior peninsula, is the corner
of the everything ever written.
This music pushing with sun from the holes
in the barn is the corner of everything never written.
We are working diligently for each others muscles.

5.
Frequently the quality of life here rolls
between Easter Sunday yellow and pale Persian blue.
Easing into something as thick as stagnant water
or the passing of time takes thick skin
and energy exerted by all parties. A rowboat
floats in the sun or a canoe pulls below
the low brush shrubs and low brush yawns
and we stay afloat in a sea of that which will come.

6.
Because this is only one state,
one ready creased easing idea of time and space,
there is no time to waste on unimportant details.
There is no time for nonsense or for newness
in the shape of anything but word, and song, and truant blueberries.
the only truth in early morning conversation
is the shapes our mouths tend to take
against the stillness of another morning's light.