Square Dancing to Ox-Bow

Ox-Bow is an art colony near Saugatuk, Michigan.  It is not easy to get there from here and so I wrote this poem.  It will be published soon in a chapbook of my poems Between Sweetwater and Sand.

Square Dancing to Ox-Bow

The car radio plays a fiddle tune—

I’m taking a road I would never choose

Allemande left with your left hand

Now do si do and circle right

Chicken in the pan picking up dough

Pass that car; don’t be slow.

Round about drive to old Ox-Bow

Speed bump here—speed bump there

Can’t get to Heaven in a rocking chair.

The shortest distance to there is a square.

Go up the hill if you dare

Must back up—one narrow lane so

Finally arrived at old Ox-Bow

that smells of paint and clay and poems.

We climb tall dunes—dark narrow path

Through climax forest—circle left.

I see a deer--doe see doe!

Will I ever reach the top?

Excerpted from Between Sweetwater and Sand

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