Girls of Lake

        For Diane Seuss

It seemed there were always tornadoes blowing through youevery day of my childhood when the storm warnings rolled over

the thick, gray glass of our television and if the sirens didn't singfrom behind the curtains my mother made, if there wasn't death and wind

in our own square of lawn beyond that cloth, then it seemedthey were always calling in Cass, your county over from mine, reporting a funnel

in Dowagiac or Edwardsburg. When I was a girl and didn't know youwhen I had the legs of a colt and you were done being an orchid on the streets

of New York City, when you had returned in the time of your white dressand your good legs to the basin of the lakes, of your birth, a thousand milkweed pods

opened their cotton and drifted. We knew the same water meadowssame cattails and loosestrifes. I dug them up and collected the clumped clay

into plastic pots for my own pond. We both grew on a flat horizonof lake and girl and the stacks of sky hammering the sky into us

the sky entering us down to our ankles forever.We will never get the lake out of our hair.

We grew like the poison vines along the north/southcontinental divide. I straddled it when I drove and was driven

around town I went with boys across the lineto buy liquor on Sundays. I skirted your girlhood home.

I skirted your Moon Cemeteryand dipped my skin into Diamond, into Eagle

Lakes at night where I lit cigarettes and rejected marriageproposals. You and I, all our piss and waste flowing

into the bowl of Michigan, which means 'large lake,' which meanswe white people saying Lake, Large Lake, in half a language

our people wanted to kill. You were born in Michigan Citywhich is in Indiana, which is the same misnomer I was born in

murder on our tongues; you have noted the Wal-Mart parking lotand its covering of native graves. You have shown up at the damp threshold

of my remembering, and now I am born lushlyagain, given permission to name this dark paradise.