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What Wisconsin Took 
The maples are out of work this winter. On the state 
highway lining the fields, the trees are stripped, 
but create no new economies. The wind strums a guitar 
that is badly out of tune. The corn men of Orfordville 
with stubble faces drink their coffee black, parlay 
excuses on hockey games, argue over an obsolete war 
and a buzzer-beater basket thirty three years ago, wink 
at the widowed waitress and a dad's Prohibition profits. 
Somewhere else in town, the plump and skinny wives 
crow of granddaughters with money and day jobs 
in Milwaukee. Someone else's daughters have the night 
jobs. The men could forgive their own, had they not 
forgotten when they left what it took to make this life. 
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