A Connecticut Poem

What did I do to deserve Connecticut?
Stevens moved here in 1916 when he was thirty-six
as I am now. It would be another seven years
before Harmonium appeared. He worked
in Hartford, an insurance man dutifully behind his desk
all day. I work in Danbury, a one-time typesetter
who now sees his work offshored to Chennai all day.
This isn’t going anywhere is it? I require help—
what about the sycamores, the maples, the oaks?
What about the robins returning each spring?
What about the nutmeg? What the hell can you make
with that anyway? I’d rather have the saffron
my grandma Keeney (né Messina) brought back with her
from Italy. She was alive then, so long ago
I was taking classes at Central Connecticut State
and wondering where all of the poetry was
as my American Lit class skipped Pound, Williams,
Stevens, Eliot, Frost, and Crane. No Olson, no Creeley,
no Ashbery or O’Hara, no Ginsberg, no Kerouac.
No Langston Hughes, Lorine Neidecker, Sylvia Plath,
nothing but a hasty reading of "Diving into the Wreck"
on the last day of class. I used the last two pages
of the final exam blue book to list the professor’s wrongs
(the same prof who went on for a good ten minutes
about exiguous, used to describe someone’s nose
in Daisy Miller; thinking it meant “large,”
he explained the Latin route, ex-, meaning “out of”—
being the thoughtful guy that I am, I didn’t correct him
in front of the class, but simply mentioned it afterwards)
for my troubles, which I thought honestly worth
a few extra points, even if some of what I wrote probably
rankled him but hey I was being timed remember,
I saw my grade knocked down to an A minus.
Connecticut is like that, whether you get to drive
to work through the cavernous shade and gentle hills
of Litchfield County or live in the traffic on I-95
but KC needs to get some files off our computer now
which she will bring with her today to the high school
where she’ll be getting her classroom ready
so I’ll be stopping here. We found a dead mouse
in our house this morning and I need to figure out what to do.