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