American Life in Poetry: Column 153

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

In this endearing short poem by Californian Trish Dugger,
we can imagine "what if?" What if we had been given "a baker's
dozen of hearts?" I imagine many more and various love poems
would be written. Here Ms. Dugger, Poet Laureate of the City
of Encinitas, makes fine use of the one patched but good heart
she has.

Spare Parts

We barge out of the womb
with two of them: eyes, ears,

arms, hands, legs, feet.
Only one heart. Not a good

plan. God should know we
need at least a dozen,

a baker's dozen of hearts.
They break like Easter eggs

hidden in the grass,
stepped on and smashed.

My own heart is patched,
bandaged, taped, barely

the same shape it once was
when it beat fast for you.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The
Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher
of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department
of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.Poem 
copyright (c) 2006 by Trish Dugger. Reprinted from
"Magee Park Poets:Anthology 2007," No. 18, Friends
of the Carlsbad City Library, 2006, by permission of Trish Dugger.
Introduction copyright (c) 2008 by The Poetry Foundation.
The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United
States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library
of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited
manuscripts. 
******************************

by Sarah Busse

Rosemary


1.
A more careful music begins.
Deep green and delicate
blue question of violins,
the surge, the swipe of oil
at the base of the thumb.

2.
Rub this sprig behind my ear
after dinner is done, the bowls clean,
and at the neck’s hollow, and here
below the breast and I will bring
this pungency, this urgency to bed.

3.
Now it grows to a shrub, grows in-
to a hedge, goes wild, standing
waves of a storm frozen
in a front yard heave like waves
of a nineteenth-century Japanese sea,

4.
tossed up never to fall, the spray
a glitter only in the mind’s eye.

-first appeared in Ash Canyon Review, Summer 2005

By Timothy Walsh
Arabella’s Arsenal

Every morning, when she walked along the lake
just after dawn,
the great blue heron would be standing
on one of the docks,
unperturbed by pedestrians or passing cars.

She saw the heron as herself—
wary, long-legged, and solitary.

Back home, the kitchen was her arsenal—
potato masher, garlic press,
salt shaker, pepper mill,
knives, ladles, slotted spoons….

In the basement, she hung her husband’s shirts
from hangers like tender effigies.
She loved him best when she watched him sleep
or when she could make him eggs.
Sometimes, all alone, she longed to feel his weight
upon her,
but at night she longed for sleep.

Late at night, she’d awaken and wander
the moonlit house.
In the kitchen, the stove looked like a seated god.
Wooden spoons whispered among themselves.
Droplets dripped from faucets like pearls.

In the cutlery drawer, knives, forks, and spoons
lay in quiet collusion.
By the dim green light of the cold stove clock,
she’d lay out a line of spoons
and an opposing army of knives.

Sometimes a mouse would scurry across the floor,
and then the secret melody of time
seemed strung together of nursery rhymes,
her own life fleeting
as the quick glint of a knife.

Trivet, spatula, and wire whisk.
A wife is what they called her,
but a heron is what she was.

-This poem first appeared in Inkwell

By Wendy Vardaman

Heaven and Hell
for Farideh Hassanzedeh

She says she could forget, if not
for her indifferent feet,
the dead child, her dead child;
if not for the insistent feet

that bring her to the place where head
strong bombs stole his small hands, made
him a damaged bird with useless
wings, fit only for burying. She said

that when she shuts her restless
eyes to sleep, her child comes
back to life. I wonder
if God could forget about us,

too, if her own feet didn’t take her
unwilling to us, if we didn’t linger
behind her eyelids. I believe
that in the next world, if there

is a next world, all those who live
behind a mother’s lids, including those of
God, will be as real to everyone as to their mothers,
that God will be as real as every mother.

-originally published in Thanal Online

by Jeri McCormick

To Charlotte, after the stroke

a letter unsent

I am coming to sing the old songs we used to belt
in twang-loud accents; I am coming to reminisce
about friendship’s genesis, sixty odd years ago

when the future was ‘out there,’ a mist less real
than our morning breath in the schoolyard.
I am coming to re-play fifth grade, trade secrets

in the cloak room, zip up jokes with snowpants
and galoshes. I, the straggly-haired kid
from the mountains; you, the prom-queen-to-be

in your waist-hugging curls. I am coming
to live again those row-lined days of reports
and recitation, penmanship and composition,

all the after-adventures, college and weddings,
jobs and distance, children and decades.
I am coming to be your gray-haired sidekick,

palpitate the hearts of bandy-legged men
out cruising in bathrobes and prong-tipped canes.
I am coming to pinpoint heroism in the halls

push your spoke-spinning chair
through memory’s doors. And though you
can no longer frame our time in words, dear Charlotte,

I am coming to speak for both of us.


-first appeared in Appalachian Journal, Spring/Summer 2006

American Life in Poetry: Column 147

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

Our earliest recollections are often imprinted in our memories
because the were associated with some kind of stress.  Here,
in an untitled poem, Nebraska State Poet, William Kloefkorn,
brings back a difficult moment from many years before, and makes a
late confession:

I stand alone at the foot
Of my father's grave,
Trembling to tell:
The door to the granary is open,
Sir,
And someone lost the bucket
To the well.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry
Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry
magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English
at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c)
2004 by William Kloefkorn, whose most recent book of poetry
is "Still Life Moving", WSC Press, 2007, illustrated with
pastel paintings by Carlos Frey. Reprinted from "Alvin Turner
As Farmer," Logan House, 2004, by permission of the author
and publisher. Introduction copyright (c) 2007 by The Poetry
Foundation.  The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served
as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the
Library of Congress from 2004-2006.  We do not accept
unsolicited manuscripts. 
******************************

by Angela J. Rydell

Pregnant Woman Thinks of Rainforest

The elephant stands on a stool—one-footed—
a teacup curled in her trunk, the delicate gauze of a tutu 
stretched over her ample torso.

Some kids nearby have become the quietest 
they’ve been in probably weeks, mouths four poised O’s,

as if in awe, she believes, of how love can be so fat and enormous,  
thick-skinned, compliant when trained, yet twitching  
a sail-sized ear, a tail, its true nature bursting the seams 
of its costume, tuned to the far off stammers of toucans,  
the flexible cage of a zebra’s running body, 
while balanced so carefully in the spotlight, on stage,

on one small point, chair top to foot, and what a foot: 
strong as a Mack truck, sensitive as the bones of the ear, 
evolved, when pressed, to feel,  
through any molecule on its wide pad of sole,  
tremors, voices, seismically wise,  
speaking to her through the shifting earth.

-originally published in The Beloit Poetry Journal, winter 2008

by Lynn Patrick Smith

These Little Scenes

The angora night
ignores the man
standing at an angle
against the disabled elevator
chanting about angels.

By the nearly naked
vacant lot
the Palomino Limo
looking for a parking place
barely misses
the Masquerading Mercedes
in cascading rain.

In a crowd
it’s easy to pick out
the crazed accountant
with his fettuccini ledgers
leaking loopholes and nooses.

The inconvenient couple
in constant battle,
with whistle-stop talk
rattling waiting room mood,
travel by elevator and limo
dangle on loopholes
and nooses.


-originally appeared in These Little Scenes, Fireweed Press, 2006, by Lynn Patrick Smith.

American Life in Poetry: Column 150

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

There's a world of great interest and significance right under our feet, but most of us don't think to look down. We spend most of our time peering off into the future, speculating on how we will deal with whatever is coming our way. Or dwelling on the past. Here Ed Ochester stops in the middle of life to look down.

What the Frost Casts Up

A crown of handmade nails, as though
there were a house here once, burned,
where we've gardened for fifteen years;
the ceramic top of an ancient fuse;
this spring the tiny head of a plastic doll--
not much compared to what they find
in England, where every now and then
a coin of the Roman emperors, Severus
or Constantius, works its way up, but
something, as though nothing we've
ever touched wants to stay in the earth,
the patient artifacts waiting, having been lost
or cast away, as though they couldn't bear
the parting, or because they are the only
messengers from lives that were important once,
waiting for the power of the frost
to move them to the mercy of our hands.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c) 2001 by Ed Ochester. Reprinted from "Unreconstructed: Poems Selected and New" by Ed Ochester, Autumn House Press, 2007, by permission of the author and publisher. Introduction copyright (c) 2008 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.
******************************

by Lynn Patrick Smith

Waiting for the Paper

My paperboy is sleeping in again
so I’m staring at some scare-tactic infomercial
about my body’s bankrupt enzymes
being the reason for the recent demise
of my high energy level
and how they don’t replace themselves.
Of course this Doctor has a remedy
that is so obvious someone should have
already thought of it.
And he doesn’t want a Nobel Prize
just thirty-nine ninety-five.

Yesterday it was the Rolling Fat Burner
wheeling its way into my living room
promising to cure all my ills
as I coast back and forth across the floor
on its patented caster wheels
literally feeling the results
in minutes.

I’ll tell you, I can tolerate lactose
and I’m not lacking essential nutrients
available in convenient powder mixes
now with five fresh flavors
and I have no burning desire
to relive the 70s with the
Bellbottom Rock CD collection.
I don’t even need Ginkgo Biloba to remember
why I feel out of sorts.
It’s because the world is starting up
and I’m sitting here with a cup of coffee
and no newspaper.

-originally appeared in These Little Scenes, Fireweed Press, 2006, by Lynn Patrick Smith.

by Janet Taliaferro

Night Terrors and the Wizard of Oz

They were under my bed
the creatures with conical hats,
orange and green.

They bobbed around the room
just at the corner of my eye
and disappeared when I looked
directly at them.

They didn’t come every night
but often enough for a year or two
that I would call for my parents
afraid to go to their room.

Mother never heard me
but my father, clad in striped pajamas
of some color I couldn’t make out,
would appear like a friendly apparition at my door,

“What is it?”
“They’re back,” I would say
in a voice pinched with fear.
“Would you like a glass of water?”
“Please.”

With a single swallow
the creatures melted
like the Witch of the West
in the Wizard of Oz.

And Wizard he was
born in the time of Queen Victoria
and not an affectionate man
but patient with children
he could hold
two diametrically opposed ideas
in his mind at once and still seem plausible.

He believed women should be demure
and soft of voice.
He would quote Shakespeare
to make his point on the rare occasions
we discussed anything
but science and business.

On my sixteenth birthday
he gave me a book about love
a sentimental text
reflective, I thought, more of his first marriage
ended at two weeks with the death of the bride
rather than an indictment
of the bitter stalemate with my mother.

It was the only time the subject was approached
and when I see the book on my shelf
I think of it as a manual with a single instruction
“Here. It’s your heart. You figure it out.”

The summer I was eighteen
we stood on the street corner
in the windy space between two bank buildings
and he handed me a check
for my entire college expenses.

As we discussed how to invest the money
for the next four years
it was as though he had handed me
the complete confidence
of a pair of ruby slippers
and said, “It’s all yours.
You have the wit to get over night terrors.
Get on with it.”

-originally appeared in Northern Virginia Review