Michael Prior’s Inauguration Poem

By Patrick Coy-Bjork ’23

At the beginning of October, we had the pleasure of getting to see Assistant Professor Michael Prior back in the Twin Cities! Michael Prior is on a fellowship in New York City for this academic year. Specifically, it is a fellowship granted to him from the Jerome Foundation, an organization that looks to provide support and resources for artists in Minnesota and New York. Michael, a poet, is spending this fellowship working on his new manuscript, which will explore Japanese internment camps in North America. 

Michael was invited to come back to St. Paul this month to compose and share a poem at President Suzanne Rivera’s inauguration on October 9th. As Michael said when he introduced the work, the poem is meant to commemorate and celebrate the event, as well as remind the Macalester community “to look after one another,” as advised by his grandfather. Below is the transcript of Michael’s poem.

Thank you Michael!

ODE

On the occasion of President Rivera’s Macalester inauguration

To all things both singular and plural,

together when together and apart: the starlings’

morning murmuration above the parkway

like the last words of a letter scattering from the page,

and below, the lanes of glinting traffic merging

past the point. Here, chrysanthemums in a glass

and further, the tidepools’ midnight chitin, rockweed’s

braided strands, each shallow well of sand a dioramic world

suddenly spilling into the next. Which is to say,

we are what we choose to cleave to. Which is to say, attention

is the asymptotic curve of love. Which is to say

I admire the way my mother still writes whole emails

in the subject line—the one she sent yesterday

in its entirety: Do you remember the fireflies in Ithaca?

and I thought of a long June evening, the fields past the lake

where we had driven, neither of us having seen

something like it before or since: their constellary glow

flaring and flickering like a dreaming mind, a city

slowly waking. Today, I realized what she meant

was closed borders, a continent, a pandemic,

that she missed me—as I miss her, my sister, the nephew

I’ve only seen tottering across my phone’s screen,

and my grandfather, who survived a wartime prison camp,

who still finds joy in supermarkets, table-tennis

at the center, sencha’s tempest in a cup, the sight

of seiners bristling along the Fraser—and who,

even now, at nearly 90, is heading out to cross the highway,

fabric mask halving his face, to leave baskets

of fruit and canned goods outside the apartment doors

of friends hungrier than he once was. We are

what we choose to attend to, and we are what we

can share. Which is to say this light is as much

Vermeer’s as Basho’s. Which is to say we are not Odysseus,

but the ship, and the oars, and even the water

upon which all glide, shirred by the wind, its breath of sleep,

the same that stirs the willows I watch at dusk

whose branches look like woven hands.

I want to praise the small miracles

of persistence: the weeds that vein

the pavement beautiful, the rain and rust

flaking away the iron spikes bolted to benches and steps—

anywhere someone might sleep—and the woman

with the hacksaw at 2AM who’s finishing the job.

And then, too, the blue-winged, orange-breasted thrushes

that flock between the scaffolding,

and sometimes, without any discernible reason,

burst toward the lake, like a single-minded semaphore,

a shimmering missive from many lives

that begins What does it look like

to look after one another? and ends

We’re here together now.