Fleda Brown

Fleda Brown's No Need of Sympathy is coming out from BOA in 2013. Her memoir, Driving with Dvorak, was published in 2010 (University of Nebraska Press). She is professor emerita at the University of Delaware and now lives in Traverse City, Michigan. She is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency M.F.A. program in Tacoma, Washington.

Sleeping Bear Dunes

I always think I want to take one of those terrible panoramic
photos from here. To stop everything, water thrashing

from horizon to horizon, and that heaping up of land,
Sleeping Bear, mourning under her dune for her drowned cubs.

But wind has already worn her down. If I spread my arms
I might fly off the cliff. I couldn't get a decent picture, anyway,

sand singing and stinging upward from the blue. I could get
the wind, leaves flying. And deer tracks up the slope,

their slippery indentations. You would study the photo
with the wistful loneliness of one asked to appreciate what's

already past, and furthermore, belonged to me. I'd be alone,
again, trying to say something. It would drive me crazy,

wind from all directions. I'd have to be a gull to put things
differently, to see the figure on the dune holding out her arms,

the line of rain over Manitou brightening. To balance
the meaning of this delicately enough to stay aloft.