by Ted Kooser
into an earlier life, holding a thread
of the old world's noises, and feeling his way
through the bones. The scratch of my pen
keeps the thread taut. When I finish
the poem, and the sound in the room goes slack,
the cat will come scampering back
into the blinding, bright rooms of his eyes.
North of Alliance
This is an empty house; not a stick
of furniture left, not even
a newspaper sodden with rain
under a broken window; nothing
to tell us the style of the people
who lived here, but that
they took it along. But wait:
here, penciled in inches
up a doorframe, these little marks
mark the growth of a child
impatient to get on with it,
a child stretching his neck
in a hurry to leave nothing here
but an absence grown tall in a doorway.
Late September
Behind each garage a ladder
sleeps in the leaves, its hands
folded across its lean belly.
There are hundreds of them
in each town, and more
sleeping by haystacks and barns
out in the country—tough old
day laborers, seasoned and wheezy,
drunk on the weather,
sleeping outside with the crickets.
Carrie
“There's never an end to dust
and dusting,” my aunt would say
as her rag, like a thunderhead,
scudded across the yellow oak
of her little house. There she lived
seventy years with a ball
of compulsion closed in her fist,
and an elbow that creaked and popped
like a branch in a storm. Now dust
is her hands and dust her heart.
There's never an end to it.
For a Friend
Late November, driving to Wichita.
A black veil of starlings
snags on a thicket and falls.
Shadows of wings skitter over
the highway, like leaves, like ashes.
You have been dead for six months;
though summer and fall
were lighter by one life,
they didn't seem to show it.
The seasons, those steady horses,
are used to the fickle weight
of our shifting load.
I'll guess how it was; on the road
through the wood, you stood up
in the back of the hangman's cart,
reached a low-hanging branch,
and swung up into the green leaves
of our memories.
Old friend,
the stars were shattered windshield glass
for weeks; we all were sorry.
They never found that part of you
that made you drink, that made you cruel.
You knew we loved you anyway.
Black streak across the centerline,
all highways make me think of you.
Grandfather
Driving the team, he came up over
the hill and looked down. In the white bowl
of the snow-covered valley, his house
was aflame like a wick, drawing up
into itself all that he'd worked for.
Once, forty years later, we passed.
It was October. The cellar
was filled by a flame of young trees.
I got out, but he sat in the back
and stared straight ahead, this old, old man,
still tight on the reins of his years.
Looking for You, Barbara
I have been out looking for you,
Barbara, and as I drove around,
the steering wheel turned through my hands
like a clock. The moon
rolled over the rooftops and was gone.
I was dead tired; in my arms
they were rolling the tires inside;
in my legs they were locking the pumps.
Yet what was in me for you
flapped as red in my veins
as banners strung over a car lot.
Then I came home and got drunk.
Where were you? 2 A.M.
is full of slim manikins
waving their furs from black windows.
My bed goes once more around the block,
and my heart keeps on honking its horn.
Pocket Poem
If this comes creased and creased again and soiled
as if I'd opened it a thousand times
to see if what I'd written here was right,
it's all because I looked for you too long
to put it in your pocket. Midnight says
the little gifts of loneliness come wrapped
by nervous fingers. What I wanted this
to say was that I want to be so close
that when you find it, it is warm from me.
Moles
The young of the mole
are born in the skull of a mayor.
They learn footfall
and rain. In the Season
of Falling Pinecones, they gather
in churches of ribs,
whining and puking.
When one of the old moles dies,
the young push him out of his tunnel
and set him afloat on the light.
This is the way we find them
out in the garden,
their little oars
pulled up and drying.
Notes on the Death of Nels Paulssen, Farmer, at the Ripe Old Age of 93
A harvest
of nail parings,
a wagonload
of hair—
over his ashen
fields,
no dust
in the air.
Advice
We go out of our way to get home,
getting lost in a rack of old clothing,
fainting in stairwells,
our pulses fluttering like moths.
We will always be
leaving our loves like old stoves
in abandoned apartments. Early in life
there are signals of how it will be—
we throw up the window one spring
and the window weights break from their ropes
and fall deep in the wall.
After My Grandmother's Funeral
After my grandmother's funeral,
as the dark river of mourners
murmured beneath me, I lay
on the floor of her attic,
watching the afternoon light
fade from the vault of old rafters
and dim to a film of gray dust
on her dresses and shoes.
I closed my eyes and slept,
but no dream came to me;
the coffin of that attic
was not to be borne aloft
on the good shoulders of cousins;
nor was it to roll on chrome wheels
to an altar with candles;
nor was I to awaken to find
my fingers laced loosely
over my heart. No dream came then
to help me leap over
the years to my death.
I awakened still young,
still sad, no longer welcome
in that darkening house.
A Hot Night in Wheat Country
One doctor in a Piper Cub
can wake up everyone in North Dakota.
At the level of an open upstairs window,
a great white plain stretches away—
the naked Methodists
lying on top of their bedding.
The moon covers her eyes with a cloud.
Five P.M.
The pigeon flies to her resting place
on a window led
ge above the traffic,
and her shadow, which cannot fly, climbs
swiftly over the bricks to meet her there.
Just so are you and I gathered at 5:00,
your bicycle left by the porch, the wind
still ringing in it, and my shoes by the bed,
still warm from walking home to you.
Abandoned Farmhouse
He was a big man, says the size of his shoes
on a pile of broken dishes by the house;
a tall man too, says the length of the bed
in an upstairs room; and a good, God-fearing man,
says the Bible with a broken back
on the floor below the window, dusty with sun;
but not a man for farming, say the fields
cluttered with boulders and the leaky barn.
A woman lived with him, says the bedroom wall
papered with lilacs and the kitchen shelves
covered with oilcloth, and they had a child,
says the sandbox made from a tractor tire.
Money was scarce, say the jars of plum preserves
and canned tomatoes sealed in the cellar hole.
And the winters cold, say the rags in the window frames.
It was lonely here, says the narrow country road.
Something went wrong, says the empty house
in the weed-choked yard. Stones in the fields
say he was not a farmer; the still-sealed jars
in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste.
And the child? Its toys are strewn in the yard
like branches after a storm—a rubber cow,
a rusty tractor with a broken plow,
a doll in overalls. Something went wrong, they say.
The Blind Always Come as Such a Surprise
The blind always come as such a surprise,
suddenly filling an elevator
with a great white porcupine of canes,
or coming down upon us in a noisy crowd
like the eye of a hurricane.
The dashboards of cars stopped at crosswalks
and the shoes of commuters on trains
are covered with sentences
struck down in mid-flight by the canes of the blind.
Each of them changes our lives,
tapping across the bright circles of our ambitions
like cracks traversing the favorite china.
Furnace
There's a click like a piece of chalk
tapping a blackboard, and the furnace
starts thinking: Now, just where was I?
It's always the same stale thought
turned over and over: Got to
get something to eat. Nothing else
ever enters its mind. After all,
it's a very old furnace,
and all of its friends have moved on.
West Window
An owl
washes his claws
in the wind,
sets down
in light
no brighter
than a candle makes,
to eat. The days
draw back their warmth
from us
like cooling lamps.
We grow
to be alone
with table and cup.
Boarding House
The blind man draws his curtains for the night
and goes to bed, leaving a burning light
above the bathroom mirror. Through the wall,
he hears the deaf man walking down the hall
in his squeaky shoes to see if there's a light
under the blind man's door, and all is right.
A Letter from Aunt Belle
You couldn't have heard about it there—
I'll send the clippings later on.
The afternoon that the neighbors' stove exploded—
how it reminded me of…Sarah's garden wedding!
Do you remember? It was beautiful.
As I was watering those slips
I promised you—the violets—
there was an awful thud, and Samson's wall
puffed up and blew the windows out.
It turned some pictures in the living room,
and that lovely vase you children gave to me
Christmas of ’56 fell down, but I can glue it.
That Franklin boy you knew in school—
the one who got that girl in trouble—
ran in the Samsons' house, but she was dead;
the blast collapsed her lungs, poor thing.
She always made me think of you,
but on the stretcher with her hair pinned up
and one old sandal off, she looked as old
as poor old me.
I have to go—
I've baked a little coffee cake
for Mr. Samson and the boys.
The violet slips are ready—
Write.
At the Bait Stand
Part barn, part boxcar, part of a chicken shed,
part leaking water, something partly dead,
part pop machine, part gas pump, part a chair
leaned back against the wall, and sleeping there,
part-owner Herman Runner, mostly fat,
hip-waders, undershirt, tattoos and hat.
The Tattooed Lady
Around the smallpox vaccination scar
I'd hated since I was a little girl
I had him put this daisy, then its stem
because the flower looked too spidery
without a stem, and then these little leaves.
He said to think of it as just a gift
for a pretty girl. I went to him that night
because my arm was swollen, and I stayed
for twenty years. Around the daisy's stem
he slowly wound a snake that circled me
with swirls of trailer camps and cheap hotels
and sideshows, yet I loved the masterpiece
that I became to him. His touch had touched
me everywhere. His love is here to see.
A Death at the Office
The news goes desk to desk
like a memo: Initial
and pass on. Each of us marks
Surprised or Sorry.
The management came early
and buried her nameplate
deep in her desk. They have boxed up
the Midol and Lip-Ice,
the snapshots from home,
wherever it was—nephews
and nieces, a strange, blurred cat
with fiery, flashbulb eyes
as if it grieved. But who grieves here?
We have her ballpoints back,
her bud vase. One of us tears
the scribbles from her calendar.
There Is Always a Little Wind
There is always a little wind
in a country cemetery,
even on days when the air stands
still as a barn in the fields.
You can see the old cedars,
stringy and tough as maiden aunts,
taking the little gusts of wind
in their aprons like sheaves of wheat,
and hear above you the warm
and regular sweep of wheat being cut
and gathered, the wagons creaking,
the young men breathing at their work.
The Widow Lester
I was too old to be married,
but nobody told me.
I guess they didn't care enough.
How it had hurt, though, catching bouquets
all those years!
Then I met Ivan, and kept him,
and never knew love.
How his feet stunk in the bed sheets!
I could have told him to wash,
but I wanted to hold that stink against him.
The day he dropped dead in the field,
I was watching.
I was hanging up sheets
in the yard,
and I finished.
Houses at the Edge of Town
These are the houses of farmers
retired from their fields;
white houses, freshly folded
and springing open again
like legal papers. These are houses
drawn up on the shore of the fields,
their nets still wet,
the fishermen sleeping curled in the bows.
See how the gardens
wade into the edge of the hayfield,
the cucumbers crawling out under the lilacs
to lie in the sun.
The Old Woman
The old woman, asleep on her back,
pulls up her knees and gives birth
to an empty house. She kicks off
the quilt and sheet and rakes her shift
up over her hips, showing her sex
to the photos of children
arranged on the opposite wall
who, years before, turned their
moonlit faces away.
A Place in Kansas
—for Jon Gierlich
Somewhere in Kansas, a friend found
an empty stone house alone in a wheatfield.
Over the door was incised a ship's anchor.
There was no one to ask
what that anchor was doing in Kansas,
no water for miles.
Not a single white sail of a meaning
broke the horizon, though he stood there for hours.
It's like that in Kansas, forever.
Tom Ball's Barn
—for Bill Kloefkorn
The loan that built the barn
just wasn't big enough
to buy the paint, so the barn
went bare and fell apart
at the mortgaged end of twelve
nail-popping, splintering winters.
Besides the Januaries,
the barber says it was
five-and-a-half percent,
three dry years, seven wet,
and two indifferent,
the banker (dead five years),
and the bank (still open
but deaf, or deef as it were), and
