I wore a bracelet of dry marsh grass
that grew unrestrained
by the water’s edge.
I buried my feet in the warm sand,
and inhaled the smell of big water everywhere:
fish guts drying between bleached rocks.
This inland sea was deep and mysterious enough
to hide an angry Poseidon .
Clad in cutoffs, I was the ten year old pirate
of these parts.
I picked the shore clean
finding treasures-
driftwood smooth as suede,
beach glass, tattered rope,
spiral shells, gritty rock band t-shirts, and
odd plastic pieces,
always tampax pink.
Thirty years later, the pirate
returns to the big lake.
She wades out getting pummeled
by the sudden big waves of a long past tanker,
Chicago-bound.
She holds an empty bottle
deep under the steel blue water
filling it full.
She knows a place far south
dying of thirst, a windswept land,
more sandstone than soil.
A place they say was once
covered by an ocean.
She wonders if this dry land
is now more her home.
The bottle of Lake Michigan
sits in the window sill.
Algae, sand, and fish-parts float together
behind the glass; the stuff of childhood dreams.
The pirate in her can’t let it go.