Think about this, old
shoe, pinned to the floor by my sole
, where would you be
if I walked on my hands (
and where, I

ask, would you be if I
traded you in
for a bright black camero
). you sat

in the window of my
station wagon, pretending not to turn
pink in bold stripes.
you held

mud, you held mold
, you held my feet although I danced
, drunk, the music
spilling over rubber legs
, faithfully

laced tight until
broken, then spliced end to
end with a knot
, now laces pull up

short
, plunging my
foot into you, my fancy pink
pig flying through the expanding hole.

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006 — The Illinois poet, Lisel Mueller, is one of our country’s finest writers, and the following lines, with their grace and humility, are representative of her poems of quiet celebration.

In November

Outside the house the wind is howling
and the trees are creaking horribly.
This is an old story
with its old beginning,
as I lay me down to sleep.
But when I wake up, sunlight
has taken over the room.
You have already made the coffee
and the radio brings us music
from a confident age. In the paper
bad news is set in distant places.
Whatever was bound to happen
in my story did not happen.
But I know there are rules that cannot be broken.
Perhaps a name was changed.
A small mistake. Perhaps
a woman I do not know
is facing the day with the heavy heart
that, by all rights, should have been mine.

Reprinted from “Alive Together: New and Selected Poems,” Louisiana State University Press, 1996, by permission of the author. Poem copyright (c) 1996 by Lisel Mueller. 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.