Things that make me say, "hmm"

I found this on http://www.poetryaloud.org/ while I was browsing poems.

Poem with One Fact
By Donald Hall
"At pet stores in Detroit, you can buy
frozen rats
for seventy-five cents apiece, to feed
your pet boa constrictor"
back home in Grosse Pointe,
or in Grosse Pointe Park,
while the free nation of rats
in Detroit emerges
from alleys behind pet shops, from cellars
and junked cars, and gathers
to flow at twilight
like a river the color of pavement,
and crawls over bedrooms and groceries
and through broken
school windows to eat the crayon
from drawings of rats—
and no one in Detroit understands
how rats are delicious in Dearborn.
If only we could communicate, if only
the boa constrictors of Southfield
would slither down I-94,
turn north on the Lodge Expressway,
and head for Eighth Street, to eat
out for a change. Instead, tomorrow,
a man from Birmingham enters
a pet shop in Detroit
to buy a frozen German shepherd
for six dollars and fifty cents
to feed his pet cheetah,
guarding the compound at home.
Oh, they arrive all day, in their
locked cars, buying
schoolyards, bridges, buses,
churches, and Ethnic Festivals;
they buy a frozen Texaco station
for eighty-four dollars and fifty cents
to feed to an imported London taxi
in Huntington Woods;
they buy Tiger Stadium,
frozen, to feed to the Little League
in Grosse Ile. They bring everything
home, frozen solid
as pig iron, to the six-car garages
of Harper Woods, Grosse Pointe Woods,
Farmington, Grosse Pointe
Farms, Troy, and Grosse Arbor—
and they ingest
everything, and fall asleep, and lie
coiled in the sun, while the city
thaws in the stomach and slides
to the small intestine, where enzymes
break down molecules of protein
to amino acids, which enter
the cold bloodstream.

Donald Hall, “Poem with One Fact” from Old and New Poems.

This poem is definitely one that makes me say "hmm." I take a step back and think through some of the connections the poet makes as his fact grows to represent something much larger and I simultaneously feel drawn to his idea and repelled. I really like that he starts with a single incident and gradually pulls out layers of meaning. He stretches us little by little into accepting his ever growing metaphor. I can sympathize with some of his ideas-- consumerism, a lack of concern for the most ecologically friendly solutions, an increasing dependency on the production or items. And yet I think Hall takes this a bit far. Or maybe he is just exaggerating his point--the world's consumerism has grown to extreme heights. God has entrusted us with his earth and we waste far more than necessary. How could we better care for the resources around us?

I think an interesting writing exercise could derive from this poem: follow Hall's example and let a poem grow from a single fact. I love how symbolic his statistic becomes. Perhaps I will assign this project to myself and see what can grow from a simple bit of information. Now which fact should I start with?