At the Bishop Baraga Shrine
—Keweenaw Bay, Baraga, Michigan
In the fall, for the sake of sheer movement
and time alone, she had come this far north from Florida,
land of Ponce de León, tracing U.S. 41
on her way to its source up in Copper Harbor.
Now this sculpted jut of chin, eyes of a raptor, staring
far out to where the bay meets Superior.
At the rest stop she had seen the flier’s imperative:
See the Shrine of the Snowshoe Priest!
Something in her had been piqued, if not curiosity
then perhaps needs which she had left unattended
for years. Deus Absconditus, Deus Ex Machina—
Since college she hadn’t thought it really mattered.
Catholic but long since lapsed, she thought
this bronze cassock seemed no different
from the lampblack gowns of the grade school priests,
a wrap barely containing its messianic rut, useless,
she had always thought, a matter of sheer waste
around which the sisters constantly clucked
and fussed, flirtatious brides of Christ engaged
in a chaste estrous dance. True, in her own way
she was something like a pilgrim, her motive
more modern, more profane—to save what might
yet be redeemed, though most of her heart had refused
to leave the galvanic thrum of Miami
for this lonely peninsula pointing across
this plumb-less expanse of lake like an arthritic finger.
She drops a few coins from her purse
into the box for donations, but as she begins to drift
absently back to the parking lot, some buried reflex
makes her turn back and kneel in the rustic grotto
before radiant rows of votive candles left by hosts
of summer visitors already gone before her.
Touching the wick to one of the transfixing eyes
of flame, she thinks suddenly of Pascal’s wager,
and, like an agate picked up quite by chance
on a beach, her mind retrieves a melodious bit
of song, a TV ad from her childhood: If everyone lit
just one little candle, what a bright world
this would be. And because she does still believe
in the saving power of gesture, irony’s inner
voice is little more than an insect’s faint gossip
in her ear, a black fly’s perhaps, which, she’s heard,
no longer bites this late in the year.
by Randall R. Freisinger
Houghton, Michigan
Randall R. Freisinger’s poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies and have been nominated for five Pushcart Prizes. He has four collections of poems: Running Patterns (1985 Flume Press National Chapbook Competition winner), Hand Shadows (Green Tower Press, 1988), Plato’s Breath (May Swenson Poetry Prize, Utah State University Press, 1997), and Nostalgia’s Thread: Ten Poems on Norman Rockwell Paintings (Hol Art Books, 2009).
He was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, and educated at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Since 1977 he has lived in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where he is Emeritus Professor of Rhetoric, Literature, and Creative Writing in the Department of Humanities at Michigan Technological University.
Freisinger’s poem “At the Bishop Baraga Shrine” is included in the new book “The Way North” which is a collection of Upper Peninsula writing pulished by the Wayne State University Press. It is long overdue and a welcome addition to the literary oeurve of the Upper Peninsula. Read more about the book which is edited by Ron Riekki here.
