Editor's Note: The three poems excerpted here are from Inner States, the as-yet-unpublished collection of 50 poems — one for each of the United States — by artist and author Lorenzo Moog.
I was born in Minnesota and live and write in the state of Washington. Three things happened within a few months of each other that led to this writing experience:
First, a road trip across the United States during which I was constantly delighted and amazed by the landscapes, the regional variations, the plants and animals and the light. I made notes.
Shortly after that trip I read the results of a survey of college sophomores in which 65 percent were geographically illiterate about their own country. For instance, a large sampling said they “weren’t sure” whether Miami was in the state of Florida, which was disheartening to say the least.
Finally, on the train from Boston to Philadelphia I was astonished by the squalor and decay of the towns and cities along the way as the train lumbered through Connecticut, which was very at odds with my previous experiences of that state.
When I returned to Seattle I wrote the first piece, Connecticut, with four more states quickly following at random. The rest evolved over a period of three years as I made discoveries about myself as a writer, a person and an American. In the process of writing the collection of 50 poems, Inner States, college sophomores were never very far from my mind nor were the extraordinary landscapes, the flora and fauna, and history and astonishing diversity of the country we call America.
Here are three of the 50 state poems:
CONNECTICUT
If you want to see Connecticut
take the train south from
Boston, it’s quite a trip.
You’ll be relieved of all your
pre-conceptions of this as a rich
and privileged place.
The railroad view may not
be perfectly accurate but
it’s another bookend look down
the row of life’s stories
from Darien and Greenwich
and mansions by the sea.
Oh yes, there’s ocean front
real estate here and mountains
too and pretty old towns in
the interior with lots of emotionally
cool tortoise shell and linen types
mingling with the rednecks.
In estates, historic houses,
beautiful gardens or trailer parks,
Anglophiles and hairy-backed
Mediterraneans are all jostling
under a very pale blue sky.
Its tasteful here, the very best
and tasteless here the very worst,
an exercise in class Americana
from the country clubs, green
in Hartford, to the squalid gray
and crumbling towns along
the track.
Connecticut is like a balancing act
of jugglers on tight ropes.
Some of the jugglers have nets
beneath them, some of them do not.
DELAWARE
Once one day in August in the dog day heat
of the Johnson administration
my young friend and I headed north
from Washington to Rehoboth Beach
on the Delaware shore.
Before air conditioning
that town was where many in Congress
brought their weary selves in summer
to escape the heat of the capitol and
the burdens of manipulating the Constitution.
On crossing the state line into Delaware
it wasn’t long before we smelled the sea feeling
heat rise up from the two lane road lined
with black-eyed daisies and Queen Anne’s lace.
We bought a watermelon from a country kid
with two teeth and a bottle of gin for
two dollars fifty in the town.
The beach was hot,
we roasted, but refreshed ourselves liberally
with alternating mouthfuls of sweet, red melon
and the gin.
The rest of that day and night
is a blur except that I recall when walking
along the shore by moonlight our footprints
shimmered silver in the sand and we slept
on the beach with strangers.
The horseshoe crabs, a species little evolved
in 250 million years, crawled among us to lay
their pearly green eggs, fertilize them,
then depart, knowing that waves would later
cover the nests with sand; horseshoe crabs
had been coming to Delaware for a long, long time.
As the luck of youth would have it we had spent
the night in front of a good hotel.
We shambled into the dining room to the disdain of the classical
waiters who assessed us with disgust but my friend,
being from the privileged class, barked at them
in a language they understood.
The taste of the food has never left me; eggs,
poached in mussel stock, served with a golden
filet of striped bass.
Even with my bleary eyes
and sandy clothes I delighted in the setting
of the spacious room with doors thrown open
to the morning, warm sea breezes billowing
through frothy curtains.
WASHINGTON
This place has a split personality.
It’s called the
Evergreen State
but that is only a half truth.
A better name would be
The Green and Gold State
as rugged Cascade Mountains
split the state in two,
leaving the east side dry and golden,
the west side wet and always green.
Mountains matter here.
Newborn, snow- capped mountains,
seething with red-hot energy,
slumbering volcanoes awaiting their time.
The Olympics rear up on the coastal side,
the Cascades cut the ground in two,
Mt. Baker looms, St. Helens growls,
Olympus broods, Rainier rules over all.
The Cascades, rippling down the middle,
cast their climactic — emotional spell
over land and people alike.
The east is apples, lentils and wheat
with Spokane,
isolated, determined and reserved.
The west is computers, coffee and jets
with Seattle,
quirky, eccentric and cultured.
In these two regions, east and west,
it is the simple difference between
no and yes.
Native languages spill out in many places,
names of the rivers for instance;
Duwamish, Skykomish,
Stilaquamish, Snohomish, Quilcene,
rivers Chief Seattle called,
not just water but the blood of our ancestors.
Rivers, land, and people, are all in concert
with the solid rhythm of towering mountains.
Clouds, the organs of union between
the mountains and sea results in cool
gray rain that falls placidly onto the land.
Out on the farthest point west, Cape Flattery,
the northern Pacific crashes
into contact with USA-America
for the first time ... in the company
of otters, whales and puffins,
salty spray mingling with forest fog,
then heading east.
