my state, his poem

If you want to see this temporary collage better, click on it. And no, everything doesn't have significance. A few things do. Can you spot them?

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Oh, and it isn't easy to make a collage when you've cleaned out your junk drawers after reading the wabi sabi book. I had to dig into the jewelry box, the feather vase and a few other storage places.

Three New Yorker magazines had piled up without my reading a single article. So I put them in order and started with the May 19 edition.

I always read the poems first, and this was the first poem. It tickled me so much I want to share it with you. Well, and it also has a couple of funny but sad lines.

(I was born in Lansing, Michigan in 1956. I've lived in other parts of the country and the world - Oregon, Chicago, Pasadena, Istanbul - a few years here and there, but I've lived in the mitten state almost as long as this poet, Bob Hicok.)

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A Primer
by Bob Hicok

I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go
to be in Michigan. The right hand of America
waving from maps or the left
pressing into clay a mold to take home
from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan
forty-three years. The state bird
is a chained factory gate. The state flower
is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical
though it is merely cold and deep as truth.
A Midwesterner can use the word “truth,”
can sincerely use the word “sincere.”
In truth the Midwest is not mid or west.
When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio.
There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life
goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam,
which we’re not getting along with
on account of the Towers as I pass.
Then Ohio goes corn corn corn
billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget
how to be from Michigan when you’re from Michigan.
It’s like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing.
The Upper Peninsula is a spare state
in case Michigan goes flat. I live now
in Virginia, which has no backup plan
but is named the same as my mother,
I live in my mother again, which is creepy
but so is what the skin under my chin is doing,
suddenly there’s a pouch like marsupials
are needed. The state joy is spring.
“Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball”
is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April,
when February hasn’t ended. February
is thirteen months long in Michigan.
We are a people who by February
want to kill the sky for being so gray
and angry at us. “What did we do?”
is the state motto. There’s a day in May
when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics
is everywhere, and daffodils are asked
by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes
with a daffodil, you know where he’s from.
In this way I have given you a primer.
Let us all be from somewhere.
Let us tell each other everything we can.