there are very often fireworks
and you can read that metaphorically
if you want to, but what I mean
is fireworks. Of the sort that
blow up in your hand. Of the
sort that are lit and smell of gunpowder.
Of the sort that leave black marks
on your fingers after hours spent lighting
them in the back yard. With your
brother. In the heat of the day.
Before his conviction. Of something else
entirely.
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006 — Some of the most telling poetry being written in our country today has to do with the smallest and briefest of pleasures. Here Marie Howe of New York captures a magical moment: sitting in the shelter of a leafy tree with the rain falling all around.
Immense, entirely itself,
it wore that yard like a dress,
with limbs low enough for me to enter it
and climb the crooked ladder to where
I could lean against the trunk and practice being alone.
One day, I heard the sound before I saw it, rain fell
darkening the sidewalk.
Sitting close to the center, not very high in the branches,
I heard it hitting the high leaves, and I was happy,
watching it happen without it happening to me.
Reprinted from “What the Living Do,” W. W. Norton & Co., 1997. Copyright (c) 1997 by Marie Howe. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.
At the exit station
there’s a graying workman
leaning on the gaspumps
and smoking a filterless cigarette
, his shovel leaning beside him
, his hand cupped against the wind.
He sometimes uses the hai
karate from the coin-op in the men’s room.
He and his two hispanic
helpers keep us from asking
for bottled water, and instead
we drink cold Coors
and return to the road.
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The smooth cool
Saturn
pulling away is not – I
repeat not – the smooth
cool on your skin
so much
as the silence
, the sound of the air
conditioner receding,
the automatic clutch
transitioning them forward
, requests
drifting into your brick
oven
to hide
during the day
, forgotten and
baked into
biscuits not even
the dog will touch.
The word touch here is
fatal
, is want, is
silent, is touch.
Pizza x Mac & Cheese
Spaghetti x Apples n Bananas
Clementines x Watermelon
Corn on the cob x Ribs
Cake x Ham sandwiches
Salami x Jam
Steak x Nachos (no meat)
Tacos (sometimes) x Chinese noodles
breathless still
imagine move terrify
ache joy crowded confounded
daughter
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
Visiting a familiar and once dear place after a long absence can knock the words right out of us, and in this poem, Keith Althaus of Massachusetts observes this happening to someone else. I like the way he suggests, at the end, that it may take days before that silence heals over.
We drove through the gates
into a maze of little roads,
with speed bumps now,
that circled a pavilion,
field house, and ran past
the playing fields and wound
their way up to the cluster
of wood and stone buildings
of the school you went to once.
The green was returning to
the trees and lawn, the lake
was still half-lidded with ice
and blind in the middle.
There was nobody around
except a few cars in front
of the administration. It must
have been spring break.
We left without ever getting out
of the car. You were quiet
that night, the next day,
the way after heavy rain
that the earth cannot absorb,
the water lies in pools
in unexpected places for days
until it disappears.
Reprinted from “Ladder of Hours: Poems 1969-2005,” Ausable Press, Keene, N.Y., 2005, by permission of the author. Copyright (c) 2005 by Keith Althaus. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.
I may ignore
or fill
are your ears
the sound
and eyes
or arms
in your teeth
under your skin
dissolved in your coffee
your cries
a sound
in the heat of the day
a radio
of sound
of your daydreams
under your pillow
on the face of a dollar
words of prayer
sewn into your shirtcloth
tied around your wrists
painted on the walls
played in a minor key
daughter goodbye
and hello are the same
sound.
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
Storytelling binds the past and present together, and is as essential to community life as are food and shelter. Many of our poets are masters at reshaping family stories as poetry. Here Lola Haskins retells a haunting tale, cast in the voice of an elder. Like the best stories, there are no inessential details. Every word counts toward the effect.
That year there were many deaths in the village.
Germs flew like angels from one house to the next
and every family gave up its own. Mothers
died at their mending. Children fell at school.
Of three hundred twenty, there were eleven left.
Then, quietly, the sun set on a day when no one
died. And the angels whispered among themselves.
And that evening, as he sat on the stone steps,
your grandfather felt a small wind on his neck
when all the trees were still. And he would tell us
always, how he had felt that night, on the skin
of his own neck, the angels, passing.
Reprinted from “Desire Lines: New and Selected Poems,” BOA Editions, 2004, by permission of the author and the publisher. Copyright (c) 2004 by Lola Haskins. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.
