You, Too, Dislike It: Maps

A weekly poem selected for likability.

This week I’ve chosen “A Primer” by Bob Hicok, originally published in the New Yorker. (The title of the post refers to the song.

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 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.

*

This poem wants to charm you. As Michigan is the “right hand of America / waving from maps,” the poem is waving its hands for your attention.

“A Primer” reminds me, in parts, of stand-up comedy, roving free-associatively from a given subject toward whatever is funny or touching, then back to his mother.

Hicok disarms us with plain language and subject matter that is at first child-like, but soon includes Rust Belt blight and 9/11; we grow up with the poet. Still, he keeps things loose, even silly, and I am charmed:

“Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball”
is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April

The end of a poem can be a stumbling block, a soapbox, a red ribbon. It’s extremely easy to fuck up. Hicok just kills it:

Let us all be from somewhere.
Let us tell each other everything we can.

The poem is recast, borrowing Robert Frost, as “a momentary stay against confusion.” The poem has light and airy passages; the ending anchors everything, making explicit a serious project: the poet has made himself known to us, has shared himself, his Michigan. And those lines could only come at the end. The poem is a life in miniature; if meaning comes at all, it’s in looking back.

I just read a great poem called “Come On All You Ghosts” by Matthew Zapruder, which ends this way:

I do not know
what terrible marvels
tomorrow will bring

but ghosts if I must join you
you and I know
I have done my best to leave

behind this machine
anyone with a mind
who cares can enter.

The poem is the machine. “A Primer” is Hicok’s Michigan machine. We’re not ghosts yet!

Huge thanks to Bob Hicok for permission to republish his poem. Buy his new collection!

“You, Too, Dislike It” appears every Thursday.

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