Poetry

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 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.

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,

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.

Your mind wouldn’t wander to that time you met a college friend for lunch at Simply Celia’s or the day you pulled kayaks from the Kalamazoo 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. 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.

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.

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.

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?

— Margaret DeRitter

DeRitter is the author of the poetry collection Singing Back 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.

Disciplined. Experienced. Thoughtful.

What wealth management should be.

Lori Hannemann, Michael Brundage, CFP® & Michelle Eldridge, CFA,CPWA® Wealth Management Partners Setting a clear path forward.

259 East Michigan Avenue, Suite 105 • Kalamazoo 269.381.1700 • www.clearridgewm.com