Along the Shores of Lake Erie

Kristina Moriconi is a poet, essayist, and visual artist whose work has appeared in a variety of literary journals and magazines including Sonora Review, terrain.org, Memoir Magazine, The MacGuffin, and Bellevue Literary Review. Her lyric narrative In the Cloakroom of Proper Musings was published in August 2020, and her hybrid memoir What Becomes of a Body is forthcoming in 2025 (Minerva Rising Press).

Grief accompanies me.

As I walk, I think of lines from a poem I memorized years back, having read it so many times: When grief sits with you… / heavy as water / more fit for gills than lungs…

Lately, there are days when it all feels like drowning—the uncertainty—the way humans insist on destroying the world.

Clots of red form at the center, deep red, vermillion perhaps, a poison bleeding out. How I no longer want to be of this country.

think: sometimes everything doesn’t happen for a reason

think: sometimes hope is not the remedy, and there exists no light

Who are these people, so in love with their darkness?

The lake here reminds me, with its turbulent flow—winds blow across its surface, energy generates currents, builds waves—there exists so much beyond our control.

I gather.

think: what’s been held by the gentle tides

think: what’s been tossed in wind-driven waves

What is pushed ashore. And the day becomes a study. And the act of seeing becomes a desire to know more.

To learn that changes in water levels caused by gravitational forces of the sun and moon occur twice daily on the Great Lakes. But that these minor variations are masked by greater fluctuations produced by wind and barometric pressure changes.

To learn, too, that wind and weather conditions on the lake can create a seiche, a standing wave oscillating high and low, in a period of time mirroring ocean tides.

This way things are brought to rest along the wrack line. And I follow the pattern of what accumulates and tangles and piles up.

Objects I observe, chronicle, as internal images move through my mind. Bashō feels close, his imagery coalescing like this, in the haibun form, with its alternating fragments of prose and haiku.

…a butterfly’s torn wing is a keepsake, Bashō writes.

And I photograph everything I can. Piece together a travelogue.

Consider and keep. Pockets damp, sandy, heavy with all I will sift and sort through.

…wanderer’s hat on my head…

As what I pick up accumulates, I think about the idea of choice. One instead of another.

Each time, a rippling out.

Or, perhaps, the absence of choice.

Who are these people, so in love with their darkness?

think: greed

think: power (abuse of)

I begin to notice ladybugs, unmoving, everywhere. Clinging to pieces of driftwood.

Collected inside hinged mussels.

Hundreds. Thousands.

…across a dark sea, Bashō writes

And I think about the reasons for this. Had they floated to shore? Had they set off to forage and been knocked off-course by the lake’s harsh wind?

Either way, I consider their migration. The probability of danger. Always, a need great enough to take the risk.

And the metaphor cries out. It insists on being heard. The headlines, boldfaced plans to declare national emergency, use military for mass deportations.

Who are these people, so in love with their darkness?

And I want to know the cause of this ladybug washup, to not believe in its randomness, the unpredictability.

The chaos of it all.

My thoughts veer back to the pages of an Annie Dillard essay, how her curiosity about the moth itself had kept her from trying to make its death make sense: Had she been new, or old? Had she mated and laid her eggs, had she done her work?

And her close observations, the solemnity with which she bears witness.

I feel my focus shift, train my eyes on details, patterns, repetition. Small white ovals, some with L-shaped grooves, others with grooves in the shape of a J. I pick up a few, but I throw them back down onto the sand.

How could I know then that what I’d found were “lucky stones”? The ear bones, or otoliths, of the freshwater drum—in times past, these “stones” had been polished, ivory-like, worn as protective amulets, traded as jewelry.

And I search for other bones, discover a cranium, teeth plates, multiple vertebrae—each centrum with its arcing spines.

I revel in the abundance, in what the lake has surrendered to me.

think: Cornell’s shadowboxes

think: Nabokov’s butterflies

This need I have to arrange what I find. To make of this day’s journey a visual narrative.

A shrine, composed of what I hold sacred. A kind of reverent preservation, of objects and memory and self.

Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form, Nabokov once said.

This way of wandering, giving myself over to wonder, how I learn to trust it will guide me through what is to come, through the darkness of doom-heavy days.

Notes:

“The Thing Is,” a poem by Ellen Bass (2002)

“Travelogue of Weather-Beaten Bones,” a haibun by Bashō (1685)

“The Death of the Moth,” an essay by Annie Dillard (1976)

“…doom-heavy days,” phrase borrowed from an online post by poet Darla Himeles (2024)

*all photographs taken by Kristina Moriconi, Presque Isle (2024)