I am uniquely privileged to be alive or so they say. I have asked others who are unsure, especially the man with three kids who’s being foreclosed next month. One daughter says she isn’t leaving the farm, they can pry her out with tractor and chain. Mother needs heart surgery but there is no insurance. A lifetime of cooking with pork fat. My friend Sam has made five hundred bucks in 40 years of writing poetry. He has applied for 120 grants but so have 50,000 others. Sam keeps strict track. The fact is he’s not very good. Back to the ******* the farm. She’s been keeping records of all the wildflowers on the never-tilled land down the road, a 40-acre clearing where they’ve bloomed since the glaciers. She picks wild strawberries with a young female bear who eats them. She’s being taken from the eastern Upper Peninsula down to Lansing where Dad has a job in a bottling plant. She won’t survive the move.
No one sees life more clearly. He made it outside the universities, the club. Hardscrabble. The way a poet should live. And, he's a born Yooper!