When I’m traveling somewhere new, or simply visiting somewhere else, I like to bring along literature reflective of the place. It was recommended to me once by a professor as a way to broaden my understanding of a place, as well as its community and history, in a way I may not otherwise access.

While Wisconsin is certainly not a new place to me, I also find literature reflective of the state can help me to understand it more deeply or in a new way.

I recently read the novel All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews, a book by a UW-Madison graduate set in Milwaukee. It was refreshing to read a story in a place I know well but through someone else’s lens.

I think poems about out state can offer us the same thing: a new way to look at the place we know well.

So here are a few Wisconsin poems for your reading this week:

A portion of:

The Late Wisconsin Spring

By John Koethe

Snow melts into the earth and a gentle breeze   

Loosens the damp gum wrappers, the stale leaves   

Left over from autumn, and the dead brown grass.   

The sky shakes itself out. And the invisible birds   

Winter put away somewhere return, the air relaxes,   

People start to circulate again in twos and threes.   

The dominant feelings are the blue sky, and the year.   

—Memories of other seasons and the billowing wind;   

The light gradually altering from difficult to clear

As a page melts and a photograph develops in the backyard.   

Reading Rilke at Lake Mendota, Wisconsin

By Aria Aber

I have relinquished my shame

now that I have mastered what wasn’t lent

to my name: three languages, one of them

dead. It is hard to misbelove

all that isn’t as absurd as my forked

childhood—first of the menses, padar’s

stethoscope, to have hours upon hours

to marvel at words like driftwood, trope,

misbelove. To miss my life in Kabul is to tongue

pears laced with needles. I had no life

in Kabul. How then can I trust my mind’s long corridor,

its longing for before? I have a faint depression

polluting my heart, sings the lake. That there is music

in everything if you tune in to it

devastates me. Even trauma sounds like Traum,

the German word for dream. Even in the dirty

atrium, Lou was waiting, tenderly, for Rilke—René,

he signed his letters, the apostrophe arced with love. Oh—

in love, I was always and providential, but what

I want is not of love. Its meatless mojo and limen

bore me. I do not want to open, neither for food

nor men. For loneliness, I keep a stone

to kiss. At night the entirety of me arches

not toward the black square

of absence, but toward you.

The Long Continuous Line

By Ellen Kort

When eating fruit, think of the person who planted the tree.—Vietnamese Proverb 

When I was nine my grandpa gave me an apple tree
in his orchard   This one is yours he said
It breathes the same air as you and me   Every time
you touch a tree you become part of the story of the earth
I didn’t know what it meant to own a tree
There was something overwhelming about a gift
that belonged to the earth   but I loved that tree
and the past into which it has gone   The nurturing
fragrance of apple blossoms   bees wild with delight
my touch-and-know of branches blessed by wind
and rain    moon and sun   My tree   My very own tree
giving its fruit without me even asking    Grandpa 
and me sitting in the grass   leaning against my tree 
listening to the rustling murmur of leaves   watching 
a flock of geese measuring the sky   distant sounds
that could be words   I loved the quiet unfolding
between us    each of us taking a bite into the sweet
sacrament of an apple   its tight red skin
hugging a generous white heart   and tucked inside
a little star-house of seeds   The only smell better than
those first white blossoms was the autumn tumble
of windfalls    the warm smell of pie baking
in grandma’s oven and applesauce spiced with cinnamon
I knew that tree   the whole taste of it   and all of its
luminous gifts like seeds in my pocket   So much gets
lost in the echoes and loneliness of memory
our hunger for roots   our need for steadiness    the promise
of tomorrow   Even now when I hold the round red
universe of an apple in the palm of my hand   I can still 
lean against that apple tree and the man who planted it

Thanks for reading along this week.

Best,

L.A. Sklba