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.

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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

American Life in Poetry: Column 055 BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

A circus is an assemblage of illusions, and here Jo McDougall, a Kansas poet, shows us a couple of performers, drab and weary in their ordinary lives, away from the lights at the center of the ring.

What We Need

It is just as well we do not see,
in the shadows behind the hasty tent
of the Allen Brothers Greatest Show,
Lola the Lion Tamer and the Great Valdini
in Nikes and jeans
sharing a tired cigarette
before she girds her wrists with glistening amulets
and snaps the tigers into rage,
before he adjusts the glimmering cummerbund
and makes from air
the white and trembling doves, the pair.

From "Dirt," Autumn House Press, Pittsburgh, 2001. Copyright (c) 2001 by Jo McDougall, whose most recent book is "Satisfied With Havoc," Autumn House Press, 2004. Reprinted by permission of the author and Autumn House 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. ******************************

by Elaine Cavanaugh

STEPPING

I plant a hedge of wild rose. I leave a row of uncut
pines. I stack new firewood on a hill, sensing
all boundaries and words for ownership are lost
in the language of cemetery stones.

I borrow the earth like a cup of sugar needed
for baking a birthday cake. It comes back to me
in light sprinkled on batches of larkspur,
in field corn, on the steps of a hillside

I climb like a ladder, hand-over-hand,
until the time I can step from
its green rungs
into the sky.


Originally published 1996 in A Wise Woman's Garden Katus Hortus, editor

American Life in Poetry: Column 053

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
Writing poetry, reading poetry, we are invited to join with others in celebrating life, even the ordinary, daily pleasures. Here the Seattle poet and physician, Peter Pereira, offer us a simple meal.

A Pot of Red Lentils

simmers on the kitchen stove.
All afternoon dense kernels
surrender to the fertile
juices, their tender bellies
swelling with delight.

In the yard we plant
rhubarb, cauliflower, and artichokes,
cupping wet earth over tubers,
our labor the germ
of later sustenance and renewal.

Across the field the sound of a baby crying
as we carry in the last carrots,
whorls of butter lettuce,
a basket of red potatoes.

I want to remember us this way--
late September sun streaming through
the window, bread loaves and golden
bunches of grapes on the table,
spoonfuls of hot soup rising
to our lips, filling us
with what endures.

Reprinted from "Saying the World," 2003, by permission of Copper Canyon Press. Copyright (c) 2003 by Peter Pereira. 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. ******************************