American Life in Poetry: Column 257
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Often when I dig some change out of my jeans pocket to pay somebody for something, the pennies and nickels are accompanied by a big gob of blue lint. So it’s no wonder that I was taken with this poem by a Massachusetts poet, Gary Metras, who isn’t embarrassed.

Lint

It doesn’t bother me to have 
lint in the bottoms of pant pockets; 
it gives the hands something to do, 
especially since I no longer hold 
shovel, hod, or hammer 
in the daylight hours of labor 
and haven’t, in fact, done so 
in twenty-five years. A long time 
to be picking lint from pockets. 
Perhaps even long enough to have 
gathered sacks full of lint 
that could have been put 
to good use, maybe spun into yarn 
to knit a sweater for my wife’s 
Christmas present, or strong thread 
whirled and woven into a tweedy jacket. 
Imagine entering my classroom 
in a jacket made from lint. 
Who would believe it? 
Yet there are stranger things— 
the son of a bricklayer with hands 
so smooth they’re only fit 
for picking lint.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2008 by Gary Metras, whose most recent book of poems is Greatest Hits 1980-2006, Pudding House, 2007. Poem reprinted from Poetry East, Nos. 62 & 63, Fall 2008, by permission of Gary Metras and the publisher. Introduction copyright ©2009 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.

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VALENTINES                                                        

by Robin  Chapman

In first grade, punching out

The cartoon speakers ballooning "Be mine,"

Laboriously copying names on the backs,

I learned who belonged to my class,

Not to leave anyone out,

And the terror and power of words— 

Whether to sign this one ‘from’ or ‘love’;

By fifth, the list mastered,

I concentrated on

The handmade art of the singled-out heart,

Folding the red construction paper in two

And cutting out half of the imagined whole     

For a boy I was too shy to speak to,

Worrying over whether I should send

The one that was too skinny or too fat;

And so it went, over the years,

The ones I sent, the ones I read,

The ones signed ‘from’ or ‘love’,

The ones that didn’t come, the ones

I didn’t send, the too-fat, too-skinny

Lopsided ones, the ones I bought myself,

While the real heart in the body beat steadily,

Keeping its faithful pace awake or asleep,

From first breath to last;

  

                                        unfolding

The morning paper last week to the hungry face

Of the Sudanese mother carrying the bones

Of her starving son on her shoulders,

Heart the only muscle he had left— 

No words for the courage and power in her face,

Or the terror of the world,

Though I am frantically cutting out hearts

For every one of us,

All of them signed ‘love.’

-from The Way In (Tebot Bach, 1999), copyright 1999 by Robin Chapman

American Life in Poetry: Column 255
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

A honeymoon. How often does one happen according to the dreams that preceded it? In this poem, Wesley McNair, a poet from Maine, describes a first night of marriage in a tawdry place. But all’s well that ends well.

For My Wife

How were we to know, leaving your two kids
behind in New Hampshire for our honeymoon
at twenty-one, that it was a trick of cheap
hotels in New York City to draw customers
like us inside by displaying a fancy lobby?
Arriving in our fourth-floor room, we found
a bed, a scarred bureau, and a bathroom door
with a cut on one side the exact shape
of the toilet bowl that was in its way
when I closed it. I opened and shut the door,
admiring the fit and despairing of it. You
discovered the initials of lovers carved
on the bureau’s top in a zigzag, breaking heart.
How wrong the place was to us then,
unable to see the portents of our future
that seem so clear now in the naiveté
of the arrangements we made, the hotel’s
disdain for those with little money,
the carving of pain and love. Yet in that room
we pulled the covers over ourselves and lay
our love down, and in this way began our unwise
and persistent and lucky life together.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2009 by Wesley McNair, whose most recent book of poems is Lovers of the Lost: New and Selected Poems, Godine, 2010. Poem reprinted from Five Points, Vol. 12, no. 3, by permission of Wesley McNair and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2009 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.

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American Life in Poetry: Column 254

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

What might my late parents have thought, I wonder, to know that there would one day be an occupation known as Tooth Painter? Here’s a partial job description by Lucille Lang Day of Oakland, California.

Tooth Painter

He was tall, lean, serious
about his profession,
said it disturbed him
to see mismatched teeth.
Squinting, he asked me
to turn toward the light
as he held an unglazed crown
by my upper incisors.
With a small brush he applied
yellow, gray, pink, violet
and green from a palette of glazes,
then fired it at sixteen hundred
degrees. We went outside
to check the final color,
and he was pleased. Today
the dentist put it in my mouth,
and no one could ever guess
my secret: there’s no one quite
like me, and I can prove it
by the unique shade of
the ivory sculptures attached
to bony sockets in my jaw.
A gallery opens when I smile.
Even the forgery gleams.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2009 by Lucille Lang Day and reprinted from The Curvature of Blue, Cervena Barva Press, 2009, by permission of Lucille Lang Day and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2009 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.