The Michigan

How much gray am I permitted to say

in one sitting? Not the meditation kind.

The unkind no hope untimely type

that lingers in my stethoscope 

while I keep reaching for your absent heart.

My spirit seeks the gray-white bark 

marked broken lines in almost black.

I kept trying to find a locus of hope,

not hocus pocus, but wrapped in constancy.

And what might that sure thing be? Some version of

God the smart, God the indignant advocate

for the lost ones of us trying to start 

again the car the world a job ourselves?

I sort of owned this State I had to leave.

It was all I had, this enclosure 

and leisure meant swallowing to protect

myself from feeling. Baptism of beer 

over and over with no redemption 

anywhere with a name unless I named it

Michigan, my mother's leftovers, 

an imposition, not Indiana, 

at least not that worse place by comparison.