Love Poem: Beside Behind Water and Fire
Robert Trezise Jr. Avatar
Written by: Robert Trezise Jr.

Beside Behind Water and Fire

In the hot A-Ga-Ming night
My wife and I skip the July 4th fireworks
At the sandbar down south on long Torch Lake

Start our own shoreline fire

Count the red electrified dorsal fins
Of the motorboat salmon swimming upstream
Migrating home from the explosions in the sky

20, 50, 80 a hundred 200 in an hour
Rainbow tsunami

Our dock leans rickety to the covenant

Lake soothes its wrinkles when the madness is over
Our souls sit back in decrescendo

Take a deep breath

To the cows mooing
Pastures away on Cairn Highway
Like foghorns from the lighthouse perched on the moon

While picking machines convulse in the cherry orchards
Tree by tree to trampolines
Whining mosquitoes if our ears were the hills

Moon slips behind the blueberry clouds

Campfire snaps its fingers for attention

A cricket chirps just outside our circle of radiant rocks
I planted decades ago

Every year he’s here too

Chirping
Chirping
To the embers of the universe

Until he isn’t.