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.

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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. ******************************