POETRY ENCORE
You wouldn’t see pigs if you took the highway or slow down to get a closer look at their glistening skin, all brown and pink, and watch them snuffling in the dirt as their smell wafts through your window.
You wouldn’t ease off the gas to see the riffles on the Gun River, the decrepit sailboat encased in vines in someone’s front yard, the tilting headstones of West Cooper Cemetery.
You wouldn’t see the Wayland State Bank building with 1917 inscribed in stone. Or learn later, after scurrying to the internet, that Ensign Pickett once ran the bank from his general store.
Yes, there’s an East Cooper Cemetery too, at D and Riverview. You wouldn’t grow curious about that either if your journey took you flying down 131.
If you hadn’t become the crazy old lady you knew as a kid who avoided highways and used both feet to brake even when she was a passenger in your mother’s car,
All those little country cemeteries would sit unseen by you. No chance to ponder their inhabitants or how much time you have to drive these roads.
you’d miss the magic of the Henika Library, its curves and angles built with fieldstone from a local farm. You’d never have the urge to return to see its pressed-tin ceilings.
Out here, time expands across herds of cows and fields of corn, growing in all directions. Sure, it takes longer to travel home. But isn’t that the point—to stretch out all the time that’s left and take in all the world can hold?
Your mind wouldn’t wander to that time — Margaret DeRitter you met a college friend for lunch at Simply Celia’s or the day you pulled kayaks from the Kalamazoo DeRitter is the author of the poetry collection Singing Back and two buff young men carried them to the car. You wouldn’t smell the smoke of a wood fire behind Bob’s old brick house or wonder whether township officials are really the bullies someone claims on a hand-painted sign.
to the Sirens (Unsolicited Press, 2020) and the chapbook Fly Me to Heaven By Way of New Jersey (Celery City Chapbook Award winner, 2019). She is also the poetry editor of Encore. She wrote this poem after driving back roads home to Kalamazoo from Grand Rapids, which she often does because she hates highways.
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Setting a clear path forward. Lori Hannemann, Michael Brundage, CFP® & Michelle Eldridge, CFA,CPWA® Wealth Management Partners
32 | ENCORE JUNE 2022
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