Gyroscope Review is celebrating National Poetry Month with a Poem Renaissance, a review of previously published poems looking for new life and new views. Every day through May 20th, a new poem to fall in love with all over again.
Hennepin Point
by Cal Freeman
Give space always for elegy,
but walk loosely in your name
over the tiny peninsulas
of granite, take a sad gambol
in weak light with water vapor
floating through and knees aching
like archaic verbs, gambol sadly
in weak light with water vapor
draping you, don’t gamble
sadly in weak light
where the hours elapse
undetected, life is not
simply a sad gamble
because a man
of 70 who happened
to be your father died.
Give space, always, for elegy,
but take care by getting out.
*
There’s a cyst
on the roof of your mother’s mouth.
They’re pretty sure it’s nothing,
benign, useless matter that nonetheless
will get excised
and examined.
Grief diffracted into
holographies of absence,
a mouth that cannot eulogize
for soreness.
*
At the end of the trail,
you watch the minks
and otters dive
into the lacustrine backwaters
below the half-sunk
cuddy cabin boat
to emerge no wiser
for their excavations.
You’re sure there’s food
down there, a whole world
you cannot navigate or see.
*
Your mother’s dog
fell from her bed yesterday
and began dragging its hind legs
like a caudal fin, like a polliwog
out of water. A few hours later,
the dog was walking fine.
You received two phone calls
with updates on the situation.
You mention it because
the old boat hardly functions
as a buoy or itself.
It’s become an attraction
for amateur photographers.
It might be the end of the world
they imagine when they snap
their shots. It might be
a pat impossibility this imagining
invokes. You mention it because only
the image of loneliness
can make loneliness bearable.
*
The assets have all been switched
into her name. She’s living well,
as they say. The boat blends
into an outcropping of poplars
when viewed from the bay
in the early evening light—
yet another inopulent detail
among so many items in a year
that go half-unrepaired as grief
before finding new vocations.
"Hennepin Point" first appeared in Hole in the Head Review.
Cal Freeman (he/him) is the author of the books Fight Songs and Poolside at the Dearborn Inn. His chapbook, Yelping the Tegmine, has just been released. His writing can be found in many publications, most recently The Glacier, Potomac Review, Panoply, and North American Review. His next book, The Weather of Our Names, is due out this year from Cornerstone Press.
Don’t forget to read the Spring 2025 Issue, available now, online and in print
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