Circe in the Upper Peninsula

Circe in the Upper Peninsula

This June, blocks of ice still float
in Lake Superior, the water temperature
not even reaching forty degrees.
The air is at eighty and climbing,
and swimmers brave the cold
to pose on ice floes in bikinis.

But before the ice melts, my father
sends me a picture from The Mining
Journal, a stark photo of a young
woman sitting on the beach, arms
wrapping her legs as she
regards the bobbing islands
that reach out past the ore dock.
He has sent the picture because
he thought I might like to write
a poem about how the woman
is contemplating the horizon as if
waiting for someone or something,
even if only for the ice to melt,
and I do want to write

that poem, but I can't help but think
of another poem I wrote in the late
1980s when I went to school
in Green Bay. That earlier poem might
have been called "Circe in Northern
Wisconsin" or "Circe as a College
Sophomore," but I called it "Circe's
Lament" because of the time I spent
gazing at another lake and trying
to summon a boy from its depths,
from the rushing of waves and wind
in my ears. And I remember
the blizzard one spring,
in May, when I didn't know classes
were canceled and ended up
moored to my waist in a drift, my path
through the snow the wake left
by a swimmer before she drowns.

And then, as now, I envy Circe,
living almost alone,
and I see her in the picture
of the woman on the beach,
and those blocks of ice that so
passively float might be the men
she has changed beyond returning,
diminishing with every coin
of light the sun spends,
waiting only for summer's
slow dissolve into the sea.