American Life in Poetry: Column 317


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


Our wars come home, sooner or later. Judith Harris lives in Washington, D.C., and in this poem gives us a veteran of Iraq back among the ordinary activities of American life.

End of Market Day


At five, the market is closing.
Burdock roots, parsley, and rutabagas
are poured back into the trucks.
The antique dealer breaks down his tables.


Light dappled, in winter parkas
shoppers hunt for bargains:
a teapot, or costume jewelry,
a grab bag of rubbishy vegetables for stew.


Now twilight, the farmer’s wife
bundled in her tweed coat and pocket apron
counts out her cash from a metal box,
and nods to her grown-up son


back from a tour in Iraq,
as he waits in the station wagon
with the country music turned way up,
his prosthetic leg gunning the engine.

  
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 Judith Harris, whose most recent book of poetry is The Bad Secret, Louisiana State University Press, 2006. Poem reprinted from The Southern Review, Vol. 46, no. 1, 2009, by permission of Judith Harris and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2011 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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By David Salner 

WORKING HERE

People who don’t work here
would never dream
what it takes to make iron.
That’s what we said at Eveleth Mines.

We walked a mile of coal-belts
to the tipping point, stared seven-stories down
into a shaft of air suffused with coal,
into the softness of slaked air.

On kiln patrol, marbles of iron
tumbled in a yellow ooze. The heat of hell
turned inches from our heads.
Then we paced a grate the size of a football field

to check each Atlas bearing
with something like a stethoscope
and listen for a telltale scratch
in the forever rolling of the world.

Or, we watched magnetic separators,
the red cones churning through a river
of gray ore. In the West Pit,
we climbed a ladder two stories high

to enter the cab of a loader. The bucket
brushed boulders of ore. It was a finger-flick.
But something about the crusher bothered us.
All over Northern Minnesota, it kept the earth awake,

shift after shift—until they shut it down,
and the whole expanse of grinding and breaking
ground to a halt. Then, everything was quiet
as an April snow. In all the bars,

the distant chatter of people, a sort of silence.
Rumors they’d be calling back
to Eveleth Mines. Rumors, then more silence.
Think back to the noisy world we kept alive

when we did things you’d never dream.
That’s what it took to make iron.


-from Working Here (Rooster Hill Press ) by David Salner. Originally appeared in Poet Lore.

By Jeanie Tomasko

The End of Dawn

A slant of pink is cradled just below
Your collarbone. It rises slightly when
You breathe, then falls. I kiss this light. I know
It is not mine to keep, but morning’s been

That way, so full of dreams. There was a time
I would have died for wings, but now to watch
You sleep is heaven. I do not want to fly.
The birds outside begin to talk of such

Ideas. Let them have their songs, their flight.
All night it stormed and I awoke to say
My prayers to gods of old—Desire and Light;
That they might change the world so I could stay.

The end of dawn and songs of birds and pain
Are more acute on mornings after rain.


-Originally appeared in The Midwest Quarterly

American Life in Poetry: Column 310



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



A friend saw a refrigerator magnet that read, PARENTING: THE FIRST 40 YEARS ARE THE HARDEST. And lots of parents, thinking their children have moved on, discover one day that those children are back. Here Marilyn L. Taylor, Poet Laureate of Wisconsin, writes of that.



Home Again, Home Again



The children are back, the children are back—

They’ve come to take refuge, exhale and unpack;

The marriage has faltered, the job has gone bad,

Come open the door for them, Mother and Dad.



The city apartment is leaky and cold,

The landlord lascivious, greedy and old—

The mattress is lumpy, the oven’s encrusted,

The freezer, the fan, and the toilet have rusted.



The company caved, the boss went broke,

The job and the love affair, all up in smoke.

The anguish of loneliness comes as a shock—

O heart in the doldrums, O heart in hock.



And so they return with their piles of possessions,

Their terrified cats and their mournful expressions,

Reclaiming the bedrooms they had in their teens,

Clean towels, warm comforter, glass figurines.



Downstairs in the kitchen the father and mother

Don’t say a word, but they look at each other

As down from the hill comes Jill, comes Jack.

The children are back. The children are back.

 
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 L. Taylor, whose most recent book of poetry is Going Wrong, Parallel Press, 2009. Poem reprinted from Wisconsin Poets Laureate, Marsh River Editions, 2009, by permission of Marilyn L. Taylor and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2011 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 307

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

I like this poem by 97-year-old Lois Beebe Hayna of Colorado for the way it captures restrained speech. The speaker spends most of her words in describing a season, but behind the changes of spring another significant change is suggested.

Brief Eden

For part of one strange year we lived
in a small house at the edge of a wood.
No neighbors, which suited us. Nobody
to ask questions. Except
for the one big question we went on
asking ourselves.
                              That spring
myriads of birds stopped over
briefly. Birds we’d never seen before, drawn
to our leafy quiet and our brook and because,
as we later learned, the place lay beneath
a flyway. Flocks appeared overnight—birds
brilliant or dull, with sharp beaks
or crossed bills, birds small
and enormous, all of them pausing
to gorge at the feeder, to rest their wings,
and disappear. Each flock seemed surer than we
of a destination. By the time we’d watched them
wing north in spring, then make
an anxious autumn return,
we too had pulled it together and we too moved
into what seemed to be our lives.

 
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 Lois Beebe Hayna, whose most recent book of poems is Keeping Still, Higganum Hill Books, 2005. Poem reprinted from The Greensboro Review, No. 86, Fall 2009, by permission of Lois Beebe Hayna 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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by Robin Chapman The Half Glass                     -for Will Some see it half empty, some half full. This one you bring to me Is half of the glass of beer we agreed to share, Poured into glasses the cheerful waitress has sized to fit. Our two half-glasses I see have become, Like this late life with you, not a test of temperament But the doubled gift Of a full glass for each. -From Love and Lust Anthology, Parallel Press (2011) -Originally appeared in BabelFruit (2009)

American Life in Poetry: Column 306

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

My grandmother Moser made wonderful cherry pies from fruit from a tree just across the road from her house, and I have loved fruit trees ever since. A cherry tree is all about giving. Here’s a poem by Nathaniel Perry, who lives in Virginia, giving us an orchard made of words.

Remaking a Neglected Orchard

It was a good idea, cutting away

the vines and ivy, trimming back

the chest-high thicket lazy years

had let grow there. Though it wasn’t for lack

of love for the trees, I’d like to point out.

Years love trees in a way we can’t

imagine. They just don’t use the fruit

like us; they want instead the slant

of sun through narrow branches, the buckshot

of rain on these old cherries. And we,

now that I think on it, want those

things too, we just always and desperately

want the sugar of the fruit, the best

we’ll get from this irascible land:

sweetness we can gather for years,

new stains staining the stains on our hands.

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 ©2010 by Nathaniel Perry, and reprinted from Gettysburg Review, Vol. 23, no. 1, Spring 2010, by permission of Nathaniel Perry and the publisher. 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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