April and Poetry

The thing is that I think I love poetry. Not all of it, but some of it, and the more I read it, the more I like it. My sister Babe has been a poet forever, but I've always been a prose girl. However, I started reading poetry after I heard Robert Bly read on NPR, and then I started not skipping over the poems in the New Yorkers that I read, and then I started requesting poetry books from the library (which are always available, by the way). Anyway, in honor of April being National Poetry Month, here's one from my (slim) files. I think I love it because Michigan is kind of like Minnesota or like South Dakota so it feels like it might be about me. About us. And I think we all know what it might feel like to want to marry a daffodil.

A Primer

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 Michgan
forty-three years. The state bird
is a chained factory gate. The state flower
is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical
thought 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 though 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.

Bob Hicok
The New Yorker, May 19, 2008