American Life in Poetry: Column 157

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

From your school days you may remember A. E. Housman's poem that begins, "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now/ Is hung with bloom along the bough." Here's a look at a blossoming cherry, done 120 years later, on site among the famous cherry trees of Washington, by D.C. poet Judith Harris.

In Your Absence

Not yet summer,
but unseasonable heat
pries open the cherry tree.

It stands there stupefied,
in its sham, pink frills,
dense with early blooming.

Then, as afternoon cools
into more furtive winds,
I look up to see
a blizzard of petals
rushing the sky.

It is only April.
I can't stop my own life
from hurrying by.
The moon, already pacing.

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) 2007 by Judith Harris, whose most recent collection of poems is "The Bad Secret," Louisiana State University Press, 2006. Reprinted by permission of Judith Harris. 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 David Graham

The Turning

--to Jean, one year dead

For some time, though, he struggled for more to hold on to. "Are you sure you have told me everything you know about his death?" he asked. I said, "Everything." "It's not much, is it?" "No," I replied, "but you can love completely without complete understanding."

--Norman Maclean. A River Runs Through It.

A year since I drove the thousand miles
it took to face your death. You were dust
before I got there, little different
from grit in the interstate wind,
ashpits smoking in backyards, rest stop tiles
smeared with grease and cracker crumbs.
You were ashes in a box, pills in the trash.

The trance of wheel-hum turned
and turned me away from that day,
away from the moonclear night
with its starry jazz, the glow
of emptied parking lots in Akron
and Youngstown. Turned me again
through thirty years of glimpse
and shrug, angers out of nowhere,
laughter equally so--yet brought me
no closer to you for all
the circus-swirl in my head.

Radio static resolved, near Harrisburg,
to a melody you loved--ice
on my tongue, fire in the blood.
I always thought there would be time
for one more pot simmering
on the stove, one more midnight
cracked open like a beer. Your
last words: "I'll call you right back."

A year now. Why should this May
astonish more or less than your last?
The trillium's up, lilacs and apple blossoms
fading fast, goldfinches stitching
the air tight. We knew summer
would come, then fall's brisk business,
winter with its bleached light,
now spring again in its watery glints,
its bluejay blare trumpeting summer.

We always knew the great mud-
and jewel-encrusted wheel
would roll us away from you, by day,
by season, by year--knew it well
before your bones consumed themselves
and your soul lapsed into morphine coma,
vegetal breath. We couldn't know
the strangeness of the turning.

The odd blessing of meals with
the gathered clan: you would have
savored that kitchen clamor, delicious
choice of side dish and placemat, reels
or ragas to throb in the background.
Heavy mugs lifted in storied air--you
would have giggled at the surge and lilt
of accents, your Dublin brother-in-law
all dickied up like the dog's dinner, a cousin
mad for Cheetohs. You would have flit
from kitchen to porch with a fresh bowl
of dip, and said very little.

Well, you're silent now. But no more so
this year than some others I could name.
Ah, we'll never finish the six-year quarrel
your cancer interrupted without resolving.
That mystery burned with your bones.
Even unto death you preferred
your chatter practical, chemo cocktails
CAT scans and bloodwork, all the apparatus
of hope, forgive me, without its soul.

I know if you could hear these words
you would swirl away like a scatter
of petals in the wind. How little
your death has changed that. Did the wheel
turn less heavily for you at that
still point? Would you cry to see
your sister cry, slipping on your coat
now washed clean of your scent?
Nothing's ever over.

Today the crows in cemetery treetops
harangue the mowers below, readying
the plots for Memorial Day. Yesterday
workmen hosed poison over the too-lush grass,
and all the dandelions wilted and withered.
I know the turning facts all too well--
gravestones will weather smooth in time,
will crack and crumble to dust, but the weeds
turn up each year brighter than flame.

-originally published in Eclectica 7.4 ((October/November 2003.)

American Life in Poetry: Column 155

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

The American poet Elizabeth Bishop often wrote of how places--
both familiar and foreign--looked, how they seemed. Here
Marianne Boruch of Indiana begins her poem in this way,
too, in a space familiar to us all but made new--made strange--by
close observation.

Hospital

It seems so--
I don't know. It seems
as if the end of the world
has never happened in here.
No smoke, no
dizzy flaring except
those candles you can light
in the chapel for a quarter.
They last maybe an hour
before burning out.
And in this room
where we wait, I see
them pass, the surgical folk--
nurses, doctors, the guy who hangs up
the blood drop--ready for lunch,
their scrubs still starched into wrinkles,
a cheerful green or pale blue,
and the end of a joke, something
about a man who thought he could be--
what? I lose it
in their brief laughter.

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 Marianne Boruch, whose most recent book of poetry is
"Grace, Fallen from," Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Poem
reprinted from "TriQuarterly," Issue 126, by permission of
Marianne Boruch. 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 Sara Parrell

Lilac Gardens


In the city of my childhood
I am dancing with Nyla Weitzmann

because it is acceptable for girls to polka
with girls under the smoky lights

of Lilac Gardens, Highway 14’s dance hall
west of everything I know.

Here our older sisters and their friends host
wedding dances and blue-ink music writes its vow

into the night. Nyla and I two-step and waltz
as good as the bridesmaids, our damp arms drape

each other’s matching shifts of puckered
pink seer-sucker and we are hot, so hot

we consider burning down the house, shouting
to the mop-haired boys slouched against

the cinder-blocks Jump up and catch me!, hustling
out the side door and into the vast tracts of grain.

This is where I lose her—she romps away
with the tall one into the rustling husks

while I back-peddle into the dark womb just in time
to see the bride lift her dress for man after man

to slip his dollar into her garter for a so-wet kiss.
-originally appeared in Wisconsin People and Ideas

by Margaret Benbow

BRIDE AND BEAR

Later they asked her why she’d ranged around
in her midnight silks, a mile from the campsite.
The truth was
that after the evening’s final peace pipe
her groom lay like a stoned pig in a poke
and she drifted off through the woods
in a hemp-brown haze,
thinking that she might see
Kelisto, a star so cold
the snow falls up
instead of down…

The air simmered with thyme and mint, wet grasses
slipping beneath her bare feet. Lianas
dragged at her legs, and she lifted her arms
in their white sleeves
like a paloma
batting its way through the buckthorn trees.
Her nightgown gleamed, lactescent with dew,
and its hem was rank and bright with spores and seeds,
the liquors of plants she’d stepped on,
puffballs, milkweed silk. Tow
nets of webs clung to her face, her lips were glazed
gold and swollen with pollen dust. Suddenly her heel
hit the head of something whose coils and bony mouth
whipped against her instep: black racer snake.
She turned and saw and smelled the bear
in the same instant,
bolt upright
like a man in a gorilla suit
but a bear, a bear. He was surprised as she
and did not touch her at once.
His pig-snout, his whole hairy mug widened
to case the new bait.
Then the clout of his paw
fell heavyweight on her brow. His claws
flicked to her shoulder, dragging stars of pain
along the baby ribbons of her nightdress.
The harsh pile of his arms swaddled her
and at first he held her quite gently, the old friend
she hadn’t seen for years. Then his hair mingled with hers
his breath an oven against her face
she felt her ribs giving way
splitting like flower stems
and when her husband and the ranger burst toward them
squawking, waving drumstick arms
she hardly knew it. The bear flung her
far away, though she tried to hold on tight:
she swam through the dark air briefly
an angel in her rippling clothes
crashed through thorns and branches
to a bank of the flower known as
shooting star. The bear rose, a vast upheaval,
seized her husband and WHOMP WHOMP
pounded him down to size, would have
plucked his catgut backbone, but even as the man’s
eyes with their bluets of bruises bugged out in the face
his own mother wouldn’t know, the ranger
handled one more dangerous character: drew,.
aimed for the beefy back of the bigger wrestler,
plugged him good.

-originally appeared in Poetry.

by Robin Chapman

PRAYERS FOR THE DEAD,

PRAYERS FOR THE LIVING

May your bodies’ dance

moving through cold and heat

dance still in that new country

May your minds’ swift fierceness

piercing space, traveling time

find joy in that new company

May your hearts’ beating, exulting leap

into the tumbled tectonic plates

leap still in memory

May what you loved—high alpine meadows,

rivers, forest, deep snows flashing light—

persist, and nourish us

May your spirits—

wild, content in solitude—shine for us

in the endless, spacious stream

-from Smoke and Strong Whiskey (WordTech Editions, 2008)

American Life in Poetry: Column 154

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

Here, poet Yusef Komunyakaa, who teaches at New York
University, shows us a fine portrait of the hard life of
a worker--in this case, a horse--and through metaphor,
the terrible, clumsy beauty of his final moments.

Yellowjackets

When the plowblade struck
An old stump hiding under
The soil like a beggar's
Rotten tooth, they swarmed up
& Mister Jackson left the plow
Wedged like a whaler's harpoon.
The horse was midnight
Against dusk, tethered to somebody's
Pocketwatch. He shivered, but not
The way women shook their heads
Before mirrors at the five
& dime--a deeper connection
To the low field's evening star.
He stood there, in tracechains,
Lathered in froth, just
Stopped by a great, goofy
Calmness. He whinnied
Once, & then the whole
Beautiful, blue-black sky
Fell on his back.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry
Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry
magazine. It is also supporte by the Department of English
at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright
(c) 2001 by Yusef Komunyakaa, reprinted from "Pleasure
Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975-1999," Wesleyan Univ.
Press, 2001, by permission  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 Richard Swanson

Lake Scene, Late Winter

Sun struck fisher
of go slow insight, your
one large eye over
one small hole
gleams at
- look! –

this
yellow perch
beauty stirring.

-From Free Verse