March in Michigan, you can start to smell the earth again. Though the leaves are still asleep, I’ve seen an occasional dandelion peek out.
Starlings and grackles show up at the bird feeder. Wild canaries put on their yellow feathers. And robins return, but where are the worms? Romance is in the air.
March can be warm as summer or cold as winter. In late March I’ve listened to frogs singing and watched the Detroit Tigers play in falling snow.
The first stanza in this month’s poem features my early impatience with March. In the next two stanzas I used my Grandpa Helmboldt’s voice to expand the story.
I remember him telling about his romantic quest at the picnic table on their 50th wedding anniversary, and Grandma’s displeasure. She didn’t have the sense of humor Grandpa did. And he loved to tease her.
Grandpa was quite a storyteller as the last two stanzas show. And most of his tales were full of truth with an exaggeration or two. If I hadn’t put his words into a poem they would have disappeared in time.
Later in my poetry career I expanded on this idea. Working with historical societies we’d bring community elders into middle and high schools. The students using tape recorders interviewed an elder, and wrote free verse poems using the elders’ own words.
Most people exaggerate a bit when communicating a memory. It’s a good way to keep people listening. Some are just more creative and graceful while talking. That’s where myth comes from.
At Stone Circle where poets and musicians gather, you hear a lot of interesting things said during conversations. The rule is, ask permission to use it, or say to the artist, “You have a month to use that in your own poem (or song) before I do.”
Once I had my words appear in another’s work. I was talking about my early romantic lifestyle and said, “I’ve had my heart broken so many times I could make a necklace with the pieces.”
Sure enough, a year later, I read what I’d said in three lines of a young poet’s chapbook. I guess he was going through a similar period in his own love life. Oh, well.
My father-in-law prided himself about being uncreative. He just happened to be very colorful while conversing. Finally, after recognizing his words in a couple of my poems, he warned his friends about me. “Watch what you say around him, or you’ll end up in one of his damn poems.”
I never saw the old Indian trail that shows up in the poem’s last stanza. But I heard about it many times from my aunts and uncles, and Grandpa. Mom’s oldest brother even drew me a map of the ghost town Park Lake.
It shows the trail curving around the west shore of the small lake and passing east of the Helmboldt homestead. It then headed northwest skirting past the number six school playground.
So the first kiss stanza is probably true. Sometimes a good narrative poem doesn’t need any exaggerations.
Now let’s return to March. My spring romantic impatience ended 51 years ago. On March 8, 1975 I met my future wife at a dance club in Traverse City. And she’s never broken my heart.