Improv, Week 2

Poem: “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. and the stacks
of the old stove factory unwinking.
Turning at last to see no island at all
but a perfect calm dark as far
as there was sight, and then a light
and another riding low out ahead
to bring us home, ore boats maybe, or smokers
walking alone. Back panting
to the gray coarse beach we didn't dare
fall on, the damp piles of clothes,
and dressing side by side in silence
to go back where we came from.

Improv:

The gray river seeps its oiled hue like the residue
of an apocalyptic painting, drawn from cigarette

ash of a lover’s lips flicked across the bridge,
baptized by street lamps and the mid sunset fog

circling the city. The starlight never peeked
through the brine, the green peaks of swamp grass,

the heavy wall of steam and smoke speaking
in circles above the stove factory you could

leap to from the rocky monument of that same
river, cobble shrine of lost childhood names.

The gray shore reminisces the Toyota tire
long abandoned by the factory worker marching,

marching still in the depths of the industrial cogs,
unaware of the river’s keen eye, or dying breathe.