[Mark McDonnell]

Far from Michigan

Michigan looks like a mitten, she said,
and home is the crook of the thumb.
She gave me a dry avocado stone.
Mystery struck me dumb.

Memory sets like a weave in the mind,
it binds it, or else it expands —
the hem of a dress, the comb of the sea,
bladderwrack strewn on the sands.

None of it real now, some of it true
and all of it moulded by time.
Dive down the sofa, tobacco-stained fingers,
pale dregs of the evening still shine.

What ghosts, what shipwrecks, fall down the cracks
or hide under rocks like a newt.
Sometimes a day can be stranger than years,
like the stone of a puzzling fruit.



S1L2 was "and I grew up just south of the thumb"

S4L1: "shipwrecks" was "galaxies"
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