Cal Freeman

Fair Lane

All our moments are last moments.
                          Jens Jensen, landscape architect

Many people are trying to find better ways
of doing things that should not have to be done at all.
                          Henry Ford

Gold scum on the pond in the Clara B. Ford Rose Garden.
The tin roof of the tea pavilion creaks.
Yew hedges train themselves to the limestone wall,
and the low-gradient river babbles where those “vagabonds”
Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, John Burroughs
and Harvey Firestone rowed and discussed strategies
for coaxing the proletariat (they wouldn’t have used that term)
to give up alcohol, meat, and jazz, to exercise the morals
requisite for self-improvement.
I’m less intent on history these days.

For now it’s enough to stroll the thicketed walkways
of Jens Jensen’s mind and emerge in the long evening light
of the meadow. To live in a town riddled with eponyms
of such a man could be a source of bitterness and the raspberry
brambles do look bitter and the yews look bitter and the rip rap
scrabbling up the berm looks bitter, and the bitter geese,
they hiss and plash in vernal pools. The yews were planted
with no thought for the hunger marchers of 1932 or the workers
beaten on the overpass in 1937 by Harry Bennett’s pigs.

We ascend the stone steps in the shade of tamaracks,
pick phragmites with wobbling blades on their stems—
this riverain, untenable riparian, these invasive prepositions
taking us from noun to noun like rhizomes, this slow green water
healing itself of decades—from the mortar they degrade,
then head down the trail over the warped pedestrian bridge to our car
with the iconic blue oval on its grill.
A moped with no lights tears down the avenue
in a cloud of smoke and a stench of burning oil.

Why put the world on wheels and mourn the world paved over?
Why wring nostalgia from the Dearborn sky as the river floods?
Why bother growing old in opulence?
The mansion must curate itself rainlessly when the weeks go rainless,
must drive its innocent tourists into the dark with floodlights
after dusk, must wait out the craven patriarch
when his ghost neglects its visitations.

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Cal Freeman (he/him) is the music editor of The Museum of Americana: A Literary Review and author of the books Fight Songs (Eyewear 2017) and Poolside at the Dearborn Inn (R&R Press 2022). His writing has appeared in many journals including Atticus Review, Image, The Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and Advanced Leisure and in several anthologies. He is a recipient of the Devine Poetry Fellowship (judged by Terrance Hayes), winner of Passages North’s Neutrino Prize, and a finalist for the River Styx International Poetry Prize. Born and raised in Detroit, he teaches at Oakland University and serves as Writer-In-Residence with InsideOut Literary Arts Detroit. His chapbook of poems, Yelping the Tegmine, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in June of 2024.