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.

Connecticut gets with the times, legalizes same-sex marriage

Yesterday was a good day to be a Connecticut resident as our state supreme court stood up against bigotry. From Daniela Altimari's report for the Hartford Courant:

The state Supreme Court on Friday delivered gay and lesbian couples the validation they have long been seeking — the right to marry.

In a 4-3 decision, the court ruled that same-sex couples cannot be prevented from marrying — and that civil unions, those marriage-like legal arrangements that Connecticut has offered to gay people since 2005, are not an acceptable substitute.

"Interpreting our state constitutional provisions in accordance with firmly established equal protection principles leads inevitably to the conclusion that gay persons are entitled to marry the ... same-sex partner of their choice," Justice Richard Palmer wrote. "To decide otherwise would require us to apply one set of constitutional principles to gay persons and another to all others."

The 85-page ruling means that thousands of gay couples soon will be able to marry in Connecticut, perhaps as early as next month. It also provides fresh fuel to opponents of same-sex marriage, who are pushing for a mechanism that would permit them to amend the state constitution to prohibit same-sex unions.

[ . . . ]

UPDATE: That last sentence quoted above is kind of scary. I just emailed State Senator Andrew Roraback and urged him to oppose any such "mechanism." Yea for me, huh?