glittering degrees

nantucket island, july 2007. last summer.


today i read a poem. i read it because i have such well-read friends, and they leave their booky eyes all over the place, quips on the internet casually strewn for people like me to find, people who used to read but now just refresh the news page as that novel yellows on the desk beside them.

this is probably illegal, but, bob hicok, you seem kind.




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.




that is most of what i have to say.
but beyond this, in my maniacal silent search of the world wide web after hearing only

There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life
goes corn corn corn mosque...

Then Ohio goes corn corn corn

billboard, goodbye, Islam.

i found an interview, with the kind bob hicok, in which somebody accurate and comforting notes that he has no "glittering degrees." no bachelor, no master, phd, mfa-

and so the unlikely future's glare is stopped, matted, no longer tightening my eyelids squinting against the impossibility of diffracted and tactless success, the success of childhood dreams, when mountains still were heights they could never be, past the mist into what looked like a town made of clouds that my mind called heaven, that whole mess of success that lingers in my bookish fact-ed mind even after i've learned the limits of my potential century here, after i learned that everest didn't crest over the exosphere, was only 8,848 meters.


i've wiped my brow! i've said that everything!-- everything is okay.