Blueshift
In memoriam, Kathleen Brumbaugh
I.
The color blue cannot be found, they say,
in most organic pigments. Birds encrust
with sponge-like keratin their feathers, a trick
to scatter light and cancel all but blue.
Blue morphos’ wings are similarly false:
their crushed-up scales will make a dusty brown.
When you first lifted up the frames that hid
my eyes, you said you never knew they were
so blue, and yet this wasn’t ever true:
my iris pigment epithelium
is likely brown as yours, but lies behind
a stroma drained of nearly every kind
of pigment under heaven, clear as water,
filled with little shards that scatter back
some tricky light, another peacock fib
derived from emptiness and waves.
II.
Ben was the one to go down, slipped
like a proboscis under the blue skin of the
big lake, and all unseen his wheaty head
was lost among so many shards of light
dancing over Michigan, wave-crash but
no Ben behind—swirling universe of sand
and pebbles churning, head somewhere some
other part should be, eyes blink see these stars,
swish of arm, two-leg kick, fast paddle to angled
sand become treadmill, he milling under, mouth
opens then because it must, ears full of grumbly
full-pool noises—lost among a mother’s
scream and the lifeguard’s whistle and legs
until the sputtersputter cough gaaaaasp—
hack up without help but the lifeguard walked
him back anyway, and suntanned Momma
holding him, him crying, him not to swim
in Lake Michigan again for two years,
never to touch water when yellow flew—and we,
we forgot slowly how to play in that horizonworld,
to splash back that tension line, the two taut blues.
III.
The lake I take you to won’t be the lake
I knew before the baselines shifted, before
the waters filled with shards.¹ Mrs. Brumbaugh
leaned one day behind the sinks and gas taps,
asking sixth-grade students, Do you like
that blue horizon that you’ve seen from blufftop
waiting for the fireworks each Fourth? Do you
remember, boys and girls, when viridescent
stripes ran out along the lighthouse, wrapped
around your legs when wading too far out,
the gentle curling of that life, when fish
washed up in summers gape-eyed by
the scores and all the world smelled like lakeside?
The sand would carry fewer gashers then,
but some year soon those shells will vanish too,
their zebra stripes won’t decorate the castles
every child today erects, studded
with tokens of insatiability,
mussels made to swallow what they’ve found
in tangles thick throughout our sweetwater sea.
Do you enjoy that photogenic blue?
The waves that whisper every break their death?
IV.
Simon Pokagon, author chief,
two turns of century ago, wrote
about the bluff we stand on now. Its name
was Ishpeming, the place where Kija Manito,
that Great Spirit, chose to set his throne,
from where we know he ambled north
at night, the stars alight in Tchibekana,
the Galaxy on High, scattering the land
with seven billion stones of every color,
shape, and size. “No such charming stones,
excepting those, could anywhere be found
around all the shores of the Great Lake.”
He later planted flowers in the forests,
one by one, and then returned to work
the great conceptions of his soul, kitchichang,
along the dune of Ishpeming. He built
a bow at least two arrow flights in length,
his mitigwa, and laid it gently out
along the bluff, where he began to paint it.
Far behind him, from the setting sun
a cyclone dropped and swept across the lake,
wawsaw mowin flashed across wawkwi,
anamika boomed with tigowog,
the rolling waves, reaching then the shore
and glorious painted bow. The earth shook,
dunes slumped against the bow (the bluff
we know), and Kija Manito smiled in the teeth
of the storm. When it retreated to the darkened
east, between its lingering shade and what
remained of evening’s crepuscular light, he blew
a tearing squall to lift the painted bow
and it ascended to the place between
the clouds and twilight, arrowless and empty,
no string or quiver, tips in treetop glow,
a bow of peace, he said, as a reminder.²
V.
The lake I take you to won’t be the lake
that swallowed Ben among a verdant throng,
that Pokagon would dream of seeing lifetimes
hence—Lake Michigan the source of life
and culture, waving on. This lake is blue
and clear as all unpeopled sky with light,
blue of emptiness, a stroma blue
bereft of pigments that it knew so long—
the Potawatomi received the tale
from the Ottawa, wrote Pokagon,
who had learned it from the Mashkode
whom they had driven from the land one half-
millennium ago. Much longer still
the lake had worn its algae and its fish,
Whitefish, Herring, Muskellunge, and never
known a zebra mussel’s sharp, gashing
shell. The shells themselves are growing sparse
of late, the castles every child today
erects in shade of Ishpeming are barer
than they’ve been. I don’t know what I want
for you to see; the lake I take you to
might wash into your memory, or rush
in roars of shipwrecking blue; I want for you
to feel the riptide in your calves, the cool
below the fire, to spy the minnows’ trace
of lacework in the shallows, scoop of beetle
back-floating away for you to save to shore
and more of power and of passing grace,
but not to love the blue, my dear, the blue
that hits our pupils rushing fast, that scorns
the fleeing redshift stars, that comes at noon,
the blue that chases faster than retreat
accusing us of our own empty sails,
self-crashing blue that churns the rocks to silt
and brightens every tourist’s photograph,
dark blue that lifts a tourist from the pier
and drowns him every year, that rocks or swathes
each day of death, of surf, of grief, of breath.
_____________________
¹In just the past twenty years, invasive zebra mussels, carried in by the hulls of boats, have cleared the swampy green-brown of Lake Michigan to a transparent, tropic-seeming blue. With this catastrophic loss of algae and a consequently unraveling ecosystem, the freshwater sea’s total weight in fish has collapsed nearly to what just one species, the alewife (itself imported), represented only ten years ago. Few of us perceive this hugely visible death.
²Chief Simon Pokagon, of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, tells this story in his partially bilingual pamphlet Algonquin Legends of South Haven, printed on birch bark in Hartford, Michigan by C. H. Engle, twelve pages with illustrations, 1900. I follow Pokagon’s spellings of Anishinaabemowin words throughout, but I follow more modern practice in omitting syllabic hyphenation.