A Poem for You: Belle Isle, 1949 BY PHILIP LEVINE

2023-05-08T12:34:43-04:00

Belle Isle, 1949 BY PHILIP LEVINE We stripped in the first warm spring night and ran down into the Detroit River to baptize ourselves in the brine of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles, melted snow. I remember going under hand in hand with a Polish highschool girl I'd never seen before, and the cries our breath made caught at the same time on the cold, and rising through the layers of darkness into the final moonless atmosphere that was this world, the girl breaking the surface after me and swimming out on the starless waters towards the lights of Jefferson Ave. [...]