What Cannot Stay

                     Porcupine Mountains, Lake Superior

Late summer, clouded sky, woods lush

after a few days’ rain. The path winds

through tall grasses that hiss in a slight

breeze, then bends toward the ridge

along the river. The cabins are gone;

the stamp mill and blacksmith shop

are gone; after a hundred years

the miners’ work has softened into leaf-

filled troughs under looming white pines.

As a boy my father came here

in winter to the logging camp, slept

in a drafty bunkhouse, woke to watch

his grandfather stoke the barrel stove

until the metal glowed. He ate in silence

with the woodsmen, fed the horses

that hauled logs on snow roads to the lake,

watched herds of deer that came at twilight

to feed on sweet top branches of felled

timber. I step over the roots of trees

that sprouted years ago in deer spoor.

The logging camps are gone, like

the white roads that melted every spring.

At the local café conversation wanders back

to the years when logs were floated down

swollen spring rivers and boys spent summers

in the fire camps, when a thousand miners

worked threads of copper from chalcocite.

Now the mine is closed, the pulp mill sold

for scrap. Frame houses buckle from the push

of wind. Families move away, or wonder

if they should. White pine saplings

have taken root in the septic field, so

I help my father dig them up, replant them

across the road. The trees his father planted

shed the seeds of these. He goes every day

to water them, names each after a grandchild

growing up far from here.

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A Proposal

There’s a three-quarter moon of a bay,

gunsteel waves washing over black rock.

The path climbs a cliff, winding past

Queen Anne’s lace and leggy grasses

to a lookout point over the harbor.

My daughter aims her camera at the sea,

at the sky briefly clouded with starlings,

at the mouth of a cannon rusting in the grass.

I take pictures of her, looking out, looking down,

looking through her lens. This is the place

in all the world, she says, where someday

she might accept a proposal. A bit out of the way,

this Scottish sea town, to which we’ve come

by chance. But it has to be here, on this cliff,

in this salt wind, with this corona of birds

wheeling around her—she just knows.

When I laid eyes on her in the first minutes

of her life I knew she wasn’t me, wasn’t mine,

she was something new. She slept against me

till dawn while I learned that I loved her.

At seventeen she is learning to leave.

I am learning to let her.

Now five teenage boys have arrived

to sit on a bench and drink from paper bags.

They stare at the sea but also at her.

When we head down the path

toward the old town their catcalls follow.

Unfazed, she tells me these boys will be

her fiancés, the five of them, since it is

very convenient to have them already here.

The bus to Newcastle arrives and for now,

we agree they can wait.