Cal Freeman
Three Poems
After Reading of Mark Truan’s Death
A great confectioner is gone.
His little factory in west Detroit
will be sold off or abandoned.
I spent hours in the store on Ford Road
while my grandmother
scooped ice cream and weighed
bags of chocolate hearts
and bird-shaped toffees
for the doomed marriages
of Dearborn Heights.
There are no graves for confectioners,
and our grandmothers
will be dead for an incalculable
number of years before the rapture.
Only the immortal
can understand the bitter
syrup in the bulla, the coloratura
of the cantor, the sick flesh grey
as gauze on a day-old dressing.
Father, grandfather,
beloved employer,
is it sweet-toothed from where you
sit to want to stave it off,
to fear both sleep and nothing?
The Carp
It isn’t enough to plead.
A novena utilized for personal ends
is merely nine days’ jaundice.
The reconstructed eye might peer
like a marble appears to when it
stills but stillness is not attention.
They wend a dye into the water
that articulates the carp’s DNA
with the color blue once
it’s swum past the barrier,
a flicker in the eye
of God, a catspaw wave
on the river—it isn’t enough
to say, What runs ripples;
what looks sometimes
makes the innocent run.
Everything Sounds Like the Clop of Water
Except the saw whet owl and the swallows.
Those balloons above the bay might’ve meant something an hour ago.
It surprised me to learn that you can stand on the shore
and not dissipate, that anyone might want this.
There’s banality and profundity in every phrase.
You just need to talk enough to get the sound right.
—Submitted on 01/31/2021
Cal Freeman is the author of Fight Songs (Eyewear Publishing, 2017). His writing has appeared in RHINO, PANK, Rattle, The Cortland Review, Southwest Review, and other journals.
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Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993.
