Cal Freeman: QUAKER SPEAK FOR DEAD • Cleaver Magazine

Poetry by Cal Freeman
QUAKER SPEAK FOR DEAD

The dreams are different
when I sleep beside Lake Erie.
I can’t remember them in much detail.

Momentous, ethereal, and cruel,
they bring my father back
at 4am, his predawn writing hour;

they bring back the faces
of dead friends. I realize
they don’t realize they’re gone

to another plane, which is Quaker
speak for dead as the walleye
speared through a poplar branch,

hung for public admonition
or defamiliarization of our idyll.
Fermi I and II are spouting

mist into the netted mackerel
sky. We almost lost Detroit
a half a century ago. Altair,

Eagle Star, lighter of the ballast
creature’s chitin, originary
aster of the beach’s asterisms,

there are too many geese
and the killdeer, shrillest
among plovers, hypochondriacal

bird of the broken wing routine
sprints through sand and crushed
shells of zebra mussels.

Cal Freeman (he/him) is the author of the books Fight Songs and Poolside at the Dearborn Inn. His writing can be found in many publications, most recently The Glacier, Potomac Review, and North American Review. His new hybrid collection, The Weather of Our Names, is now out from Cornerstone Press.