We stripped in the first warm spring night <br />and ran down into the Detroit River <br />to baptize ourselves in the brine <br />of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles, <br />melted snow. I remember going under <br />hand in hand with a Polish highschool girl <br />I'd never seen before, and the cries <br />our breath made caught at the same time <br />on the cold, and rising through the layers <br />of darkness into the final moonless atmosphere <br />that was this world, the girl breaking <br />the surface after me and swimming out <br />on the starless waters towards the lights <br />of Jefferson Ave. and the stacks <br />of the old stove factory unwinking. <br />Turning at last to see no island at all <br />but a perfect calm dark as far <br />as there was sight, and then a light <br />and another riding low out ahead <br />to bring us home, ore boats maybe, or smokers <br />walking alone. Back panting <br />to the gray coarse beach we didn't dare <br />fall on, the damp piles of clothes, <br />and dressing side by side in silence <br />to go back where we came from.<br /><br />Philip Levine<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/belle-isle-1949/
