Dear Lynn,

I don’t know why I should tell you or anyone this, as even poets have secret lives, but summers our family would spend a week on Au Train Lake in Munising at “Dick Perry’s.” I was 7 the first time and went fishing with my dad in a wood rowboat with an outboard motor. He was using a Daredevil spoon but I could not cast yet, so he baited my hook with a minnow and bobber.

I did not hook a fish and became disappointed but my father told me pike came to shore at night to feed. That evening, before the sun set, he baited another hook with a minnow, threw it into the lake, and anchored the pole on the shore.

The next morning he handed me the pole. I started to reel it in and I could feel a tug and then saw a pike near the surface. I walked backwards and pulled it on the sand, 16 inches. I was so happy. As my father did not like the smell of cooking fish, he released it. The pike sat stunned in the shallow water 20 seconds and I thought it would die; then, suddenly, it took off.

Twenty years later, our father having passed in 1982, my sister Lynn told me he’d caught a pike earlier that day, saved it, and later attached it to the hook he’d baited for me by the shore.

In later years, when I could run the outboard motor myself, I liked driving down the Au Train River toward Lake Superior. You had to go slow due to sandbars and snags. Beauty I had not seen in lower Michigan.

I returned to Au Train Lake
30 years after our last trip
driving from Los Angeles

and wasn’t sure how to find Dick Perry’s.
I turned down a sand road
that looked like the one in 1969—

it seemed unchanged,
the growing season so short in Munising,
stunted pines

and the road quickly opened to the north shore
of Au Train Lake,
and all of Dick Perry’s cabins were still there.

I parked and walked to a man
fishing on the shore.
He told me Perry had died,

his family had sold the cabins,
they were all privately owned now,
but his elderly wife

still lived in the main cabin which had been the lodge,
said, “Make yourself at home,”
and I walked the shore.

Looking out into the lake
it seemed unchanged
as did the mouth of the river that flowed from

Lake Superior
silver, sparkling
like some beautiful
uninvented
fish.

–for Diane Wakoski, my sister Lynn Purdy, Lynn Domina and Diane’s poem “Dear Michael”