MICHIGAN, TOO TRUE, TOO FUNNY

This poem -- or perhaps it is just a short prose piece with well-calculated paragraphing-- showed up in a recent issue of New Yorker.
I think you'll like this one.

A PRIMER
I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go
to be in Michigan. The right hand of America
waving from the maps or the left
pressing into clay a mold to take home
from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan
43 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 on corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam,
which we're not getting along with
on account of 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 of joy is spring.
"Osiris, we beseech the, rise and give us baseball"
is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April,
when February hasn't ended. February
is 13 months 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