American Life in Poetry: Column 284



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

I’d guess there are lots of people, like me, who sometimes visit places which in memory are hallowed but which, through time, have been changed irreparably. It is a painful experience but it underlines life. Here Carl Little, who lives in Maine, returns to a place like that.


The Clearing


The sunbox lies in pieces, 

its strips of aluminum foil 

flaking away to the wind, 

tanning platform broken up 

for kindling. Planted grass 

sprouts where the path 
once 
sharply turned to the left 

circumventing underbrush,

there the man (a boy then)

stumbled on beauty’s wrath: 

pale sisters yelling him off, 

scrambling for clothes to cover.




All has been cleared, thick 

cat briar raked into piles 

and set ablaze, invincible 
 
ailanthus stacked for dump. 

All’s clear and calm save 

his childhood rushing head- 

long through tearing thickets, 

and the sisters, barely glimpsed 

against reflective flashing, 
laughing after him, then

lying back to catch 

all the sullen autumn sun they can.
 
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 ©2006 by Carl Little and reprinted from Ocean Drinker: New and Selected Poems, Deerbrook Editions, 2006, by permission of Carl Little and the publisher. Introduction copyright ©2010 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 280
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Marilyn Kallet lives and teaches in Tennessee. Over the years I have read many poems about fireflies, but of all of them hers seems to offer the most and dearest peace.
 

Fireflies

In the dry summer field at nightfall,
fireflies rise like sparks.
Imagine the presence of ghosts
flickering, the ghosts of young friends,
your father nearest in the distance.
This time they carry no sorrow,
no remorse, their presence is so light.
Childhood comes to you,
memories of your street in lamplight,
holding those last moments before bed,
capturing lightning-bugs,
with a blossom of the hand
letting them go. Lightness returns,
an airy motion over the ground
you remember from Ring Around the Rosie.
If you stay, the fireflies become fireflies
again, not part of your stories,
as unaware of you as sleep, being
beautiful and quiet all around you.

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 Marilyn Kallet, from her most recent book of poetry, Packing Light: New and Selected Poems, Black Widow Press, 2009. Reprinted by permission of Marilyn Kallet. 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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