American Life in Poetry: Column 091

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

How many of us, when passing through some small town, have felt that it seemed familiar though we've never been there before. And of course it seems familiar because much of the course of life is pretty much the same wherever we go, right down to the up-and-down fortunes of the football team and the unanswered love letters. Here's a poem by Mark Vinz.

Driving Through

This could be the town you're from,
marked only by what it's near.
The gas station man speaks of weather
and the high school football team
just as you knew he would--
kind to strangers, happy to live here.

Tell yourself it doesn't matter now,
you're only driving through.
Past the sagging, empty porches
locked up tight to travelers' stares,
toward the great dark of the fields,
your headlights startle a flock of
old love letters--still undelivered,
enroute for years.

Reprinted from "Red River Blues," published
by College of the Mainland, Texas City, TX, 1977,
by permission of the author. Copyright (c) 1977
by Mark Vinz, whose most recent book is "Long Distance,"
Midwestern Writers Publishing House, 2005.
This weekly column is supported by The Poetry
Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the
Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept
unsolicited poetry.

by Jo Balistreri

Ancient Ritual

Dad, in his long blue robe
and thinning steel-gray hair
enters the spotless kitchen
in worn-slippered feet.
Shadowed dawn
announces its presence,
releases the closed petals
of sleep to the templed rhythm
of a new day.
Dad carefully opens the cupboard,
reverently holds a cherry blossom
plate. Setting the breakfast table
he gently places each porcelain dish
of boyhood, creates a spring
garden at each setting, forever green,
its branched blooms reaching
toward light.
A Buddhist monk, he walks
within his life treading slow measured steps,
gives attention to each detail
as if it were new.
He pours the brewed tea,
watches the waterfall pool
in the bone-thin cups, follows the steam
as it drifts upward like incense.

I smile to myself--am silent, aware
of this ancient rite of morning, watch
him walk to the draped window
to pull open the day. For a moment,
he will stand enfolded in mountain sun,
before he turns to me and says,
“Isn’t it fine.”

-originally appeared in Bellowing Ark

American Life in Poetry: Column 090

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Anyone can write a poem that nobody can understand,
but poetry is a means of communication, and this
column specializes in poems that communicate. What
comes more naturally to us than to instruct someone
in how to do something? Here the Minnesota poet and
essayist Bill Holm, who is of Icelandic parentage,
shows us how to make something delicious to eat.

Bread Soup: An Old Icelandic Recipe

Start with the square heavy loaf
steamed a whole day in a hot spring
until the coarse rye, sugar, yeast
grow dense as a black hole of bread.
Let it age and dry a little,
then soak the old loaf for a day
in warm water flavored
with raisins and lemon slices.
Boil it until it is thick as molasses.
Pour it in a flat white bowl.
Ladle a good dollop of whipped cream
to melt in its brown belly.
This soup is alive as any animal,
and the yeast and cream and rye
will sing inside you after eating
for a long time.

Reprinted from "Playing the Black Piano," 
Milkweed Editions, 2004, by permission of the author.
Copyright (c) 2004  by Bill Holm.  This weekly column
is supported by The Poetry Foundation,  The Library of
Congress, and the Department of English at the University  
of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept
unsolicited poetry.  
******************************

American Life in Poetry: Column 089

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Loss can defeat us or serve as the impetus for  
positive change. Here, Sue Ellen Thompson of 
Connecticut shows us how to mourn inevitable changes,  
tuck the memories away, then go on to see the  
possibility of a new and promising chapter in one's life.

No Children, No Pets

I bring the cat's body home from the vet's
in a running-shoe box held shut
with elastic bands. Then I clean
the corners where she has eaten and
slept, scrubbing the hard bits of food
from the baseboard, dumping the litter
and blasting the pan with a hose. The plastic
dishes I hide in the basement, the pee-
soaked towel I put in the trash. I put
the catnip mouse in the box and I put
the box away, too, in a deep
dirt drawer in the earth.

When the death-energy leaves me,
I go to the room where my daughter slept
in nursery school, grammar school, high school,
I lie on her milky bedspread and think
of the day I left her at college, how nothing
could keep me from gouging the melted candle-wax
out from between her floorboards,
or taking a razor blade to the decal
that said to the firemen, "Break
this window first." I close my eyes now
and enter a place that's clearly
expecting me, swaddled in loss
and then losing that, too, as I move
from room to bone-white room
in the house of the rest of my life.

Reprinted from "Nimrod International Journal: 
The Healing Arts," Vol. 49, No. 2, Spring-Summer, 2006, 
by permission of the author. Copyright (c) 2006
by Sue Ellen Thompson, whose latest book is
"The Golden Hour,"  Autumn House Press, 2006. 
This weekly column is supported  by The Poetry
Foundation, The Library of Congress, and  
the Department of English at the University of 
Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited 
poetry.

******************************

American Life in Poetry: Column 088

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

This wistful poem by Christopher Chambers
shows how the familiar and the odd, the real
and imaginary, exist side by side. A Midwestern
father transforms himself  from a staid
businessman into a rock-n-roll star, reclaiming
a piece of his imaginary youth. In  the end,
it shows how fragile moments might be  recovered
to offer a glimpse into our inner lives.

My Father Holds the Door for Yoko Ono

In New York City for a conference
on weed control, leaving the hotel
in a cluster of horticulturalists,
he alone stops, midwestern, crewcut,
narrow blue tie, cufflinks, wingtips,
holds the door for the Asian woman
in a miniskirt and thigh high
white leather boots. She nods
slightly, a sad and beautiful gesture.
Neither smile, as if performing
a timeless ritual, as if anticipating
the loss of a son or a lover.

Years later, Christmas, inexplicably
he dons my mother's auburn wig,
my brother's wire-rimmed glasses,
and strikes a pose clowning
with my second hand acoustic guitar.
He is transformed, a working class hero
and a door whispers shut,
like cherry blossoms falling.

Reprinted from "Folio," Winter, 2004, 
by permission of the author. Copyright (c) 2004
by Christopher Chambers, who  teaches creative
writing at Loyola University New Orleans. This
weekly  column is supported by The Poetry
Foundation, The Library of Congress,  and the
Department of English at the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln. This  column does not accept
unsolicited poetry.
******************************

American Life in Poetry: Column 087

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

The first poem we ran in this column was by
David Allan Evans of South Dakota, about a couple
washing windows together. You can find that poem
and all the others on our website,
www.americanlifeinpoetry.org. Here Tania Rochelle
of Georgia presents us with another couple, this time
raking leaves. I especially like the image of the pair
"bent like parentheses/ around their brittle little
lawn."

Raking

Anna Bell and Lane, eighty,
make small leaf piles in the heat,
each pile a great joint effort,
like fifty years of marriage,
sharing chores a rusty dance.
In my own yard, the stacks
are big as children, who scatter them,
dodge and limbo the poke
of my rake. We're lucky,
young and straight-boned.
And I feel sorry for the couple,
bent like parentheses
around their brittle little lawn.
I like feeling sorry for them,
the tenderness of it, but only
for a moment: John glides in
like a paper airplane, takes
the children for the weekend,
and I remember,
they're the lucky ones--
shriveled Anna Bell, loving
her crooked Lane.

Reprinted from "Karaoke Funeral," Snake Nation Press, 
2003, by permission of the author. Copyright (c) 2003  
by Tania Rochelle.  This weekly column is supported by
The Poetry Foundation, The Library of  Congress, and
the Department of English at the  University of
Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept
unsolicited poetry.
******************************

American Life in Poetry: Column 086
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Linda Pastan, who lives in Maryland, is a 
master of the kind of water-clear writing that 
enables us to see into the depths. This is a  
poem about migrating birds, but also about how 
it feels to witness the passing of another year.

The Birds

are heading south, pulled
by a compass in the genes.
They are not fooled
by this odd November summer,
though we stand in our doorways
wearing cotton dresses.
We are watching them

as they swoop and gather--
the shadow of wings
falls over the heart.
When they rustle among
the empty branches, the trees
must think their lost leaves
have come back.

The birds are heading south,
instinct is the oldest story.
They fly over their doubles,
the mute weathervanes,
teaching all of us
with their tailfeathers
the true north.

Reprinted from "The Imperfect Paradise," 
by Linda Pastan. Copyright (c) 1988 by Linda Pastan.
With permission of the publisher,  W.W. Norton &
Company, Inc. Ms. Pastan's most recent book is
"Queen of a  Rainy Country," W.W. Norton & Company,
Inc., 2006.   This weekly column is supported by The
Poetry  Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the 
Department of English at the University of  
Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept 
unsolicited poetry.
******************************

American Life in Poetry: Column 085

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
The Illinois poet, Lisel Mueller, is one of our country's finest writers,
and the following lines, with their grace and humility, are representative
of her poems of quiet celebration.


In November

Outside the house the wind is howling
and the trees are creaking horribly.
This is an old story
with its old beginning,
as I lay me down to sleep.
But when I wake up, sunlight
has taken over the room.
You have already made the coffee
and the radio brings us music
from a confident age. In the paper
bad news is set in distant places.
Whatever was bound to happen
in my story did not happen.
But I know there are rules that cannot be broken.
Perhaps a name was changed.
A small mistake. Perhaps
a woman I do not know
is facing the day with the heavy heart
that, by all rights, should have been mine.


Reprinted from "Alive Together: New and Selected Poems,"
Louisiana State University Press, 1996, by permission of the
author. Poem copyright (c) 1996 by Lisel Mueller. This weekly
column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of
Congress, and the Department of English at the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry. ******************************

American Life in Poetry: Column 084  
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Many of this column's readers have watched 
an amaryllis emerge from its hard bulb to flower. 
To me they seem unworldly, perhaps a little dangerous, 
like a wild bird you don't want to get too close to. 
Here Connie Wanek of Duluth, Minnesota, takes a close  
and playful look at an amaryllis that looks right back  at her.


Amaryllis

A flower needs to be this size
to conceal the winter window,
and this color, the red
of a Fiat with the top down,
to impress us, dull as we've grown.

Months ago the gigantic onion of a bulb
half above the soil
stuck out its green tongue
and slowly, day by day,
the flower itself entered our world,

closed, like hands that captured a moth,
then open, as eyes open,
and the amaryllis, seeing us,
was somehow undiscouraged.
It stands before us now

as we eat our soup;
you pour a little of your drinking water
into its saucer, and a few crumbs
of fragrant earth fall
onto the tabletop.


Reprinted from "Bonfire," New Rivers Press, 1997,
by permission of the author. Copyright (c) 1997
by Connie Wanek. Her most recent book is "Hartley Field,"
from Holy Cow! Press, 2002. This weekly column is supported
by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the
Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.

******************************

American Life in Poetry: Column 083

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Poems of simple pleasure, poems of quiet celebration, well, they aren't anything like those poems we were asked to wrestle with in high school, our teachers insisting that we get a headlock on THE MEANING. This one by Dale Ritterbusch of Wisconsin is more my cup of tea.

Green Tea

There is this tea
I have sometimes,
Pan Long Ying Hao,
so tightly curled
it looks like tiny roots
gnarled, a greenish-gray.
When it steeps, it opens
the way you woke this morning,
stretching, your hands behind
your head, back arched,
toes pointing, a smile steeped
in ceremony, a celebration,
the reaching of your arms.

Reprinted from "Far From the Temple of Heaven," Black Moss Press, April 2006, by permission of the author. Copyright (c) 2005 by Dale Ritterbusch. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry. ******************************

by Ron Czerwien

While you sleep

the moon soaps your windows,
your mirror swallows twice
the normal dosage of light,
another unsolved theft
at the Museum of Snowman Fossils;
someone is thumbing
the pages of your diary, touching
a match to the fuse of your spine,
the stars lower their hooks.

-previously published in After Hours

by Josephine Zell

RIDING THE BUS IN CAMPANIA

Red tile roofs and brown stone castles
Solid against a blue gauze sky
Rise above tranquil yellow wheatfields
And rich black earth that stops the eye.

Stencilled under brooding mountains
Is a city gleaming in the sun;
Towers, campanili, undistinguished
Homes where life ends as it was begun.

Emerald umbrella pines
In two straight lines shade a painter's road,
But we're swept along by oleanders
For miles of flowers, white and rose.

-Originally appeared in Neovictorian/Cochlea,  
Vol. IX No.2, Spring-Summer 2006; (I) from
FOUR POEMS FROM AN ITALIAN JOURNEY

American Life in Poetry: Column 081

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Readers of this column during the past year have by now learned how enthusiastic I am about poems describing everyday life. I've tried to show how the ordinary can be made extraordinary through close and transforming observation. Here Tess Gallagher goes to the mailbox to post a letter. We've all done that, haven't we? But notice how closely she pays attention to this simple experience, and how she fits this one moment into the meaning of her life.


Under Stars

The sleep of this night deepens
because I have walked coatless from the house
carrying the white envelope.
All night it will say one name
in its little tin house by the roadside.

I have raised the metal flag
so its shadow under the roadlamp
leaves an imprint on the rain-heavy bushes.
Now I will walk back
thinking of the few lights still on
in the town a mile away.

In the yellowed light of a kitchen
the millworker has finished his coffee,
his wife has laid out the white slices of bread
on the counter. Now while the bed they have left
is still warm, I will think of you, you
who are so far away
you have caused me to look up at the stars.

Tonight they have not moved
from childhood, those games played after dark.
Again I walk into the wet grass
toward the starry voices. Again, I
am the found one, intimate, returned
by all I touch on the way.

"Under Stars" copyright (c) 1987 by Tess Gallagher. Reprinted from "Amplitude: New & Selected Poems" with the permission of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota. Gallagher's most recent book of poetry is "Dear Ghosts: Poems," Graywolf Press, 2006. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.

American Life in Poetry: Column 077

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Li-Young Lee, who lives in Chicago, evokes by the use of
carefully chosen images a culture, a time of day, and the
understanding of love through the quiet observation of gesture.

Early in the Morning

While the long grain is softening
in the water, gurgling
over a low stove flame, before
the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced
for breakfast, before the birds,
my mother glides an ivory comb
through her hair, heavy
and black as calligrapher's ink.

She sits at the foot of the bed.
My father watches, listens for
the music of comb
against hair.

My mother combs,
pulls her hair back
tight, rolls it
around two fingers, pins it
in a bun to the back of her head.
For half a hundred years she has done this.
My father likes to see it like this.
He says it is kempt.

But I know
it is because of the way
my mother's hair falls
when he pulls the pins out.
Easily, like the curtains
when they untie them in the evening.

Reprinted from "Rose," BOA Editions, Ltd., 1986, by
permission of the publisher. Copyright (c) 1986 by
Li-Young Lee, whose most recent book of
poetry is "Book of My Nights," BOA Editions, Ltd., 2001.
This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation,
The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at
the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does
not accept unsolicited poetry.

******************************

by Wilda Morris

Picking Peaches

My basket full of promise
of jam and pie,
I stood beneath laden branches
among orchard fragrance
eating a perfectly reddened peach,
plump with moist pulp.

I never guessed what teeth
would eat into my soul,
turn my face red
as the ripe fruit,
moist as its sweet juice,
salt not sugar on my cheeks.


First published in Poem

by Marilyn Peretti

Movies at the Old Glen Theater

Tiny yellow twinkles
light the carpet’s thin edge
of a night-black corridor,
narrow as a poor man’s staircase,
leading an unknown distance
and around a corner
to the holy cool dark
of the movie house,
split now into four.
Sink into lumpy, leathery seats
to lean back into oblivion of fiction,
pen-concocted tales
of someone else’s calamities,
lit up in magnified faces
jerking and bouncing
with every hand-honed sentence.
How tempting to lounge
in the cushion of film,
flying me up and away. Two hours
of laughs, doubts, and loving
swell in my small head
just long enough to rearrange
its moldering contents
and ignite a few sparks,
then catapult me out
through the vacuum tunnel
into eye-squeezing bright
to where I came from, contented
after all.

-Originally published in Prairie Light Review

American Life in Poetry: Column 076

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

I'd guess we've all had dreams like the one portrayed in this wistful poem by Tennessee poet Jeff Daniel Marion. And I'd guess that like me, you too have tried to nod off again just to capture a few more moments from the past.


Reunion

Last night in a dream
you came to me. We were young
again and you were smiling,
happy in the way a sparrow in spring
hops from branch to branch.
I took you in my arms
and swung you about, so carefree
was my youth.

What can I say?
That time wears away, draws its lines
on every feature? That we wake
to dark skies whose only answer
is rain, cold as the years
that stretch behind us, blurring
this window far from you.


Reprinted from "Lost & Found," The Sow's Ear Press, Abingdon, VA, 1994, by permission of the author. Poem copyright (c) 1994 by Jeff Daniel Marion, whose most recent book is "Ebbing & Flowing Springs: New and Selected Poems and Prose, 1976-2001," Celtic Cat Publishing, 2002. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry. ******************************

American Life in Poetry: Column 073

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Those of us who have planted trees and shrubs know well that moment when the last spade full of earth is packed around the root ball and patted or stamped into place and we stand back and wish the young plant good fortune. Here the poet Roy Scheele offers us a few well-chosen words we can use the next time.


Planting a Dogwood

Tree, we take leave of you; you're on your own.
Put down your taproot with its probing hairs
that sluice the darkness and create unseen
the tree that mirrors you below the ground.
For when we plant a tree, two trees take root:
the one that lifts its leaves into the air,
and the inverted one that cleaves the soil
to find the runnel's sweet, dull silver trace
and spreads not up but down, each drop a leaf
in the eternal blackness of that sky.
The leaves you show uncurl like tiny fists
and bear small button blossoms, greenish white,
that quicken you. Now put your roots down deep;
draw light from shadow, break in on earth's sleep.


Reprinted from "From the Ground Up," Lone Willow Press, Omaha, NE, 2000, by permission of the author, whose most recent book is "A Far Allegiance," forthcoming from The Backwaters Press. Poem copyright (c) 2000 by Roy Scheele. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.
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by Penny Dyer

FINGERPRINTS

Instead, look at the painting so close
you can’t see it.
Not the image the artist willed onto the bleached
canvas skeleton. Forget what you see, what you think
he meant you to see.

Instead, see the skin,
stained in colored oils
not unlike the cleft above your left breast,
an earlobe, maybe the tender flesh behind a knee.

Look too, at the pigment flaking
green above a gold, brush-stroked autumn,
the dry craze on a stretched cloth
like the crackled lines on the backs of your hands.

Look too, at your child’s face
lined in a parchment portrait of someone
you wanted to be.
See where the paint flecks off
in tiny dismal pieces down around the sycamore’s hips,
like the fierce sweat of an autumn war, or
the sound of blood.

Look at your fingertips,
or the plowed fields of your palms.
Everything man touches,
the shined marble of museum floors,
rhombuses of wiped windows,
the swept sidewalk of your neighbor’s home—
all of them, if you look close enough
are matched fingerprints.

-Originally appeared in Chattanooga Writers Guild Anthology 2004 www.chattanoogawritersguild.org

American Life in Poetry: Column 072

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Those who survived the Great Depression of the 1930s have a tough, no-nonsense take on what work is. If when I was young I'd told my father I was looking for fulfilling work, he would have looked at me as if I'd just arrived from Mars. Here the Pennsylvania poet, Jan Beatty, takes on the voice of her father to illustrate the thinking of a generation of Americans.


My Father Teaches Me to Dream

You want to know what work is?
I'll tell you what work is:
Work is work.
You get up. You get on the bus.
You don't look from side to side.
You keep your eyes straight ahead.
That way nobody bothers you--see?
You get off the bus. You work all day.
You get back on the bus at night. Same thing.
You go to sleep. You get up.
You do the same thing again.
Nothing more. Nothing less.
There's no handouts in this life.
All this other stuff you're looking for--
it ain't there.
Work is work.

First printed in "Witness," Volume 10, Number 2, and reprinted by permission of the author. Copyright (c) 1996 by Jan Beatty, whose latest book, "Boneshaker," was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2002. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry. ******************************

American Life in Poetry: Column 071 BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

William Carlos Williams, one of our country's most influential poets and a New Jersey physician, taught us to celebrate daily life. Here Albert Garcia offers us the simple pleasures and modest mysteries of a single summer day.


August Morning

It's ripe, the melon
by our sink. Yellow,
bee-bitten, soft, it perfumes
the house too sweetly.
At five I wake, the air
mournful in its quiet.
My wife's eyes swim calmly
under their lids, her mouth and jaw
relaxed, different.
What is happening in the silence
of this house? Curtains
hang heavily from their rods.
Ficus leaves tremble
at my footsteps. Yet
the colors outside are perfect--
orange geranium, blue lobelia.
I wander from room to room
like a man in a museum:
wife, children, books, flowers,
melon. Such still air. Soon
the mid-morning breeze will float in
like tepid water, then hot.
How do I start this day,
I who am unsure
of how my life has happened
or how to proceed
amid this warm and steady sweetness?


Poem copyright (c) by Albert Garcia from his latest book "Skunk Talk" (Bear Starr Press, 2005) and originally published in "Poetry East," No. 44. Reprinted by permission of the author. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry. ******************************

by Elisavietta Ritchie

Additional Advice for a Young Poet

"A writer has nothing to teach and everything
to learn, at all times." Albert Camus

1.

If you have only one paper napkin
for those six empty minutes
cover it with a poem.

Wipe your face
on the other side.
Between the splotches: write.

2.

Lose your pen?
Try a pencil. When this
breaks, wears out,

charcoal till you're black
as the burnt stick
worn to smudge.

Then write with ash
on the sea.
Write on grass.

Try red ink on flames,
blue on the sky,
white on snow.

When all implements
disappear,
use your blood.

3.

If all you have is a paper bag,
not the notebook you always keep
in your pocket, write.


If you shop only at thrifts, still hoard
a closetful to will when you're dead,
better leave poems than rags.


-originally appeared in Confrontation 2006

American Life in Poetry: Column 070

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

As a man I'll never gain the wisdom Sharon Olds 
expresses in this poem about motherhood, but one  
of the reasons poetry is essential is that it can 
take us so far into someone else's experience 
that we feel it's our own.


My Son the Man

Suddenly his shoulders get a lot wider,
the way Houdini would expand his body
while people were putting him in chains. It seems
no time since I would help him to put on his sleeper,
guide his calves into the gold interior,
zip him up and toss him up and
catch his weight. I cannot imagine him
no longer a child, and I know I must get ready,
get over my fear of men now my son
is going to be one. This was not
what I had in mind when he pressed up through me like a
sealed trunk through the ice of the Hudson,
snapped the padlock, unsnaked the chains,
and appeared in my arms. Now he looks at me
the way Houdini studied a box
to learn the way out, then smiled and let himself be manacled.


"My Son the Man" from THE WELLSPRING by Sharon Olds.  
Copyright (c) 1996 by Sharon Olds. Used by permission of  
Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. This  
weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation,  
The Library of Congress, and the Department of English 
at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does  
not accept unsolicited poetry.  
******************************

American Life in Poetry: Column 069

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

This marvelous poem by the California poet  
Marsha Truman Cooper perfectly captures the  
world of ironing, complete with its intimacy.  
At the end, doing a job to perfection, pressing 
the perfect edge, establishes a reassuring order  
to an otherwise mundane and slightly tawdry world.


Ironing After Midnight

Your mother called it
"doing the pressing,"
and you know now
how right she was.
There is something urgent here.
Not even the hiss
under each button
or the yellow business
ground in at the neck
can make one instant
of this work seem unimportant.
You've been taught
to turn the pocket corners
and pick out the dark lint
that collects there.
You're tempted to leave it,
but the old lessons
go deeper than habits.
Everyone else is asleep.
The odor of sweat rises
when you do
under the armpits,
the owner's particular smell
you can never quite wash out.
You'll stay up.
You'll have your way,
the final stroke
and sharpness
down the long sleeves,
a truly permanent edge.


Reprinted from "River Styx," No. 32, 1990,  
by permission of the author, whose most recent 
book is "Substantial Holdings," Pudding House 
Publications, 2002. Poem copyright (c) 1990 
by Marsha Truman Cooper. This weekly column is  
supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library  
of Congress, and the Department of English at the 
University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does 
not accept unsolicited poetry.  

******************************

American Life in Poetry: Column 068

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Here is a marvelous little poem about a long marriage 
by the Kentucky poet, Wendell Berry. It's about a couple 
resigned to and comfortable with their routines. It is 
written in language as clear and simple as its subject. 
As close together as these two people have grown, as much 
alike as they have become, there is always the chance of 
the one, unpredictable, small moment of independence. Who 
will be the first to say goodnight?


They Sit Together on the Porch

They sit together on the porch, the dark
Almost fallen, the house behind them dark.
Their supper done with, they have washed and dried
The dishes--only two plates now, two glasses,
Two knives, two forks, two spoons--small work for two.
She sits with her hands folded in her lap,
At rest. He smokes his pipe. They do not speak,
And when they speak at last it is to say
What each one knows the other knows. They have
One mind between them, now, that finally
For all its knowing will not exactly know
Which one goes first through the dark doorway, bidding
Goodnight, and which sits on a while alone.


From "A Timbered Choir", by Wendell Berry. Copyright 
(c) 1998. Published and reprinted  by arrangement 
with Counterpoint Press, a member of the Perseus Books 
Group (www.perseusbooks.com). All rights reserved. This 
weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, 
The Library of Congress, and the Department of English 
at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does 
not accept unsolicited poetry.

******************************

by Wilda Morris

The Year the Herbs Went Wild

When breezes blew, sage and mint
shook seeds into the air.
They went wild, planting their offspring
in the daffodil patch, choking the mums,
filling the space between onions
and beans, leaping from the ground
beneath the gas grill.

Why did I allow this insurgency,
this rank attempt to take over
the garden? Perhaps because surgery
and radiation left me no energy
for coping with recalcitrance,
with over-abundance. Or perhaps
I couldn’t bear to be the surgeon
cutting into something so alive.


First published in SecondWind, Summer 2005.

American Life in Poetry: Column 066 BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Some of the most telling poetry being written in our country
today has to do with the smallest and briefest of pleasures.
Here Marie Howe of New York captures a magical moment:
sitting in the shelter of a leafy tree with the rain falling all around.


The Copper Beech

Immense, entirely itself,
it wore that yard like a dress,

with limbs low enough for me to enter it
and climb the crooked ladder to where

I could lean against the trunk and practice being alone.
One day, I heard the sound before I saw it, rain fell
darkening the sidewalk.

Sitting close to the center, not very high in the branches,
I heard it hitting the high leaves, and I was happy,

watching it happen without it happening to me.


Reprinted from "What the Living Do," W. W. Norton & Co., 1997. Copyright (c) 1997 by Marie Howe. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry. ******************************

American Life in Poetry: Column 065

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
Visiting a familiar and once dear place after a long absence can knock the words right out of us, and in this poem, Keith
Althaus of Massachusetts observes this happening to someone else. I like the way he suggests, at the end, that it may take days before that silence heals over.


Homecoming

We drove through the gates
into a maze of little roads,
with speed bumps now,
that circled a pavilion,
field house, and ran past
the playing fields and wound
their way up to the cluster
of wood and stone buildings
of the school you went to once.
The green was returning to
the trees and lawn, the lake
was still half-lidded with ice
and blind in the middle.
There was nobody around
except a few cars in front
of the administration. It must
have been spring break.
We left without ever getting out
of the car. You were quiet
that night, the next day,
the way after heavy rain
that the earth cannot absorb,
the water lies in pools
in unexpected places for days
until it disappears.


Reprinted from "Ladder of HoursPoems 1969-2005," Ausable Press, Keene, N.Y., 2005, by permission of the author. Copyright (c) 2005 by Keith Althaus. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry. ******************************

American Life in Poetry: Column 064

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
Storytelling binds the past and present together, and is as essential to community life as are food and shelter. Many of our poets are masters at reshaping family stories as poetry. Here Lola Haskins retells a haunting tale, cast in the voice of an elder. Like the best stories, there are no inessential details. Every word counts toward the effect.


Grandmother Speaks of the Old Country

That year there were many deaths in the village.
Germs flew like angels from one house to the next
and every family gave up its own. Mothers
died at their mending. Children fell at school.
Of three hundred twenty, there were eleven left.
Then, quietly, the sun set on a day when no one
died. And the angels whispered among themselves.
And that evening, as he sat on the stone steps,
your grandfather felt a small wind on his neck
when all the trees were still. And he would tell us
always, how he had felt that night, on the skin
of his own neck, the angels, passing.


Reprinted from "Desire Lines: New and Selected Poems," BOA Editions, 2004, by permission of the author and the publisher. Copyright (c) 2004 by Lola Haskins. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry. ******************************

Ann McNeal

I Am Not the Buddha

The long wait on shore
far from traffic
pause in the drone
between the in-breath
and the out.
Heart-slam the sudden
splash, not for me
but dragonfly who is
or is not there
when ripples
die.

Walking back to the car
I slap a mosquito.
What is written on my hand?
I am not…

Originally published in Right Hand Pointing,
Issue 6, April 2005.

American Life in Poetry: Column 062

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE 2004-2006

Gardeners who've fought Creeping Charlie and 
other unwanted plants may sympathize with 
James McKean from Iowa as he takes on Bindweed, 
a cousin to the two varieties of morning glory 
that appear in the poem. It's an endless struggle, 
and in the end, of course, the bindweed wins.


Bindweed

There is little I can do
besides stoop to pluck them
one by one from the ground,
their roots all weak links,
this hoard of Lazaruses popping up
at night, not the Heavenly Blue
so like silk handkerchiefs,
nor the Giant White so timid
in the face of the moon,
but poor relations who visit
then stay. They sleep in my garden.
Each morning I evict them.
Each night more arrive, their leaves
small, green shrouds,
reminding me the mother root
waits deep underground
and I dig but will never find her
and her children will inherit
all that I've cleared
when she holds me tighter
and tighter in her arms.


Reprinted from "Headlong," University of Utah Press, 
1987, by permission of the author, and first published 
in "Poetry Northwest," Vol. 23, No. 3, 1982. Copyright 
(c) 1982 by James McKean, whose most recent book is 
"Home Stand," a memoir published in 2005 by Michigan 
State University Press. This weekly column is supported 
by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and 
the Department of English at the University of 
Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited 
poetry.

******************************

American Life in Poetry: Column 060

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

Most of us have taken at least a moment or two
to reflect upon what we have learned from our mothers.
Through a catalog of meaningful actions that range
from spiritual to domestic, Pennsylvanian Julia Kasdorf
evokes the imprint of her mother's life on her own.
As the poem closes, the speaker invites us to learn
these actions of compassion.


What I Learned From My Mother

I learned from my mother how to love
the living, to have plenty of vases on hand
in case you have to rush to the hospital
with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants
still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars
large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole
grieving household, to cube home-canned pears
and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins
and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point.
I learned to attend viewing even if I didn't know
the deceased, to press the moist hands
of the living, to look in their eyes and offer
sympathy, as though I understood loss even then.
I learned that whatever we say means nothing,
what anyone will remember is that we came.
I learned to believe I had the power to ease
awful pains materially like an angel.
Like a doctor, I learned to create
from another's suffering my own usefulness, and once
you know how to do this, you can never refuse.
To every house you enter, you must offer
healing, a chocolate cake you baked yourself,
the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch.


Reprinted from "Sleeping Preacher," University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1992, by permission of the publisher.
First printed in "West Branch," Vol. 30, 1992.
Copyright (c) 1992 by Julia Kasdorf. This weekly column
is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of
Congress, and the Department of English at the University
of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.

American Life in Poetry: Column 058

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

A worm in an apple, a maggot in a bone, a person in the world.
What might seem an odd assortment of creatures is beautifully
interrelated by the Massachusetts poet Pat Schneider.
Her poem suggests that each living thing is richly awake to its
own particular, limited world.


There Is Another Way

There is another way to enter an apple:
a worm's way.
The small, round door
closes behind her. The world
and all its necessities
ripen around her like a room.

In the sweet marrow of a bone,
the maggot does not remember
the wingspread
of the mother, the green
shine of her body, nor even
the last breath of the dying deer.

I, too, have forgotten
how I came here, breathing
this sweet wind, drinking rain,
encased by the limits
of what I can imagine
and by a husk of stars.

Reprinted from "Another River: New and Selected
Poems," Amherst Writers & Artists Press, 2005, by
permission of the author. First printed in "Kalliope",
Vol. XII, No. 1, 1989. Copyright (c) 2004 by Pat Schneider.
This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation,
The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at
the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not
accept unsolicited poetry.
******************************

by Jackie Langetieg

Father Writes to Mother From California

I remember Grandmother’s voice
and crickets clicking behind the radiator,
feasting on dust from fresh baked bread

while I lay on the window seat
watching her polish the mound of dough
pushing and turning it on its powdery board.

Looking over at me, she dropped
a small plastic doll into the mix
folded and smoothed it into a ball

while she told me of earthquakes
in San Francisco

and how the ground would open
like cut dough,
then fold over a small girl and her mother

rolling, kneading and sealing them
into the bread of the earth, sent to the oven to bake,
disappearing beneath the cooling crust.


Previously published in “Wisconsin Academy Review,” Summer 2004

American Life in Poetry: Column 057

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

Midwestern poet Richard Newman traces the 
imaginary life of coins as a connection 
between people. The coins--seemingly of 
little value--become a ceremonial and communal 
currency. 


Coins

My change: a nickel caked with finger grime;
two nicked quarters not long for this life, worth
more for keeping dead eyes shut than bus fare;
a dime, shining in sunshine like a new dime;
grubby pennies, one stamped the year of my birth,
no brighter than I from 40 years of wear.

What purses, piggy banks, and window sills
have these coins known, their presidential heads
pinched into what beggar's chalky palm--
they circulate like tarnished red blood cells,
all of us exchanging the merest film
of our lives, and the lives of those long dead.

And now my turn in the convenience store,
I hand over my fist of change, still warm,
to the bored, lip-pierced check-out girl, once more
to be spun down cigarette machines, hurled
in fountains, flipped for luck--these dirty charms
chiming in the dark pockets of the world.


Reprinted from "Borrowed Towns," World Press, 
2005, by permission of the author. First printed 
in "Crab Orchard Review," Volume 10, No. 1, 2005. 
Copyright (c) 2005 by Richard Newman. This weekly
column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, 
The Library of Congress, and the Department of 
English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. 
This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.

******************************

American Life in Poetry: Column 056

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

When I complained about some of the tedious jobs I had as a boy, my mother would tell me, Ted, all work is honorable. In this poem, Don Welch gives us a man who's been fixing barbed wire fences all his life.


At the Edge of Town

Hard to know which is more gnarled,
the posts he hammers staples into
or the blue hummocks which run
across his hands like molehills.

Work has reduced his wrists
to bones, cut out of him
the easy flesh and brought him
down to this, the crowbar's teeth

caught just behind a barb.
Again this morning
the crowbar's neck will make
its blue slip into wood,

there will be that moment
when too much strength
will cause the wire to break.
But even at 70, he says,

he has to have it right,
and more than right.
This morning, in the pewter light,
he has the scars to prove it.


From "Gutter Flowers," Logan House, 2005. Copyright (c) 2005 by Don Welch and reprinted by permission of Logan House and the author. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry. ******************************

by Andrea Potos

QUESTIONS FOR LAVINIA DICKINSON


“ . . . shortly after Emily’s death. . . Lavinia discovered
a collection of hundreds of poems. Beneath her hands
lay her sister’s life work, in unexpected profusion.”

Jane Langton.


After your beloved sister was Called Back
and gone, did you roam her room
for hours, smoothing the long white gowns,
gathering the garments to fold
and pack away;

did some murmuring power instruct you,
or was it the mundane
reflex of grief
causing you to open the last
cherrywood drawer where you found
the stashed, locked box?

And you had the key Lavinia,
you had the key.
After you turned it,
did the stitched packets of words
tremble in your palms–

The embers of a Thousand Years
Uncovered by the Hand--

were you scorched
by their triumphant, necessary light?

-Originally appeared in Poetry East