by Ted Kooser
starlight like beads of dew
along his tight chain.
No one is there
beyond the dark garden,
nothing to bark at
except, perhaps, the thoughts
of some old man
sending his memories
out for a midnight walk,
a rich cape
woven of many loves
swept recklessly
about his shoulders.
Central
As fine a piece of furniture
as any Steinway, all oak
and nickel and Bakelite,
her switchboard stood in the kitchen
stretching the truth. While she sat
with her ear to the valley,
rumor reached its red tendrils
from socket to socket, from farm
to farm. When the sun went down,
she sat in the dark. Those voices
she'd listened to all afternoon,
clear as the high sharp cries of geese,
flew over the house and were gone.
The loose lines buzzed. In the moonlight,
her hands held the wilted bouquets
of pink rubber. “Central,” she'd say
to the darkness, “This is Central.
Hello? Is there anyone there?”
The Fan in the Window
It is September, and a cool breeze
from somewhere ahead is turning the blades;
night, and the slow flash of the fan
the last light between us and the darkness.
Dust has begun to collect on the blades,
haymaker's dust from distant fields,
dust riding to town on the night-black wings
of the crows, a thin frost of dust
which clings to the fan in just the way
we cling to the earth as it spins.
The fan has brought us through,
its shiny blades like the screw of a ship
that has pushed its way through summer—
cut flowers awash in its wake,
the stagnant Sargasso Sea of July
far behind us. For the moment, we rest,
we lie in the dark hull of the house,
we rock in the troughs off the shore
of October, the engine cooling,
the fan blades so lazily turning, but turning.
Myrtle
Wearing her yellow rubber slicker,
Myrtle, our Journal carrier,
has come early through rain and darkness
to bring us the news.
A woman of thirty or so,
with three small children at home,
she's told me she likes
a long walk by herself in the morning.
And with pride in her work,
she's wrapped the news neatly in plastic—
a bread bag, beaded with rain,
that reads WONDER.
From my doorway I watch her
flicker from porch to porch as she goes,
a yellow candle flame
no wind or weather dare extinguish.
Daddy Longlegs
Here, on fine long legs springy as steel,
a life rides, sealed in a small brown pill
that skims along over the basement floor
wrapped up in a simple obsession.
Eight legs reach out like the master ribs
of a web in which some thought is caught
dead center in its own small world,
a thought so far from the touch of things
that we can only guess at it. If mine,
it would be the secret dream
of walking alone across the floor of my life
with an easy grace, and with love enough
to live on at the center of myself.
Good-bye
You lean with one arm out
against the porch post,
your big hand cupping its curve,
shy of that handshake
we both know is coming.
And when we've said enough,
when the last small promises
begin to repeat, your eyes
come to mine, and then
you offer your hand,
dusted with chalk from the post,
and sticky with parting.
The Giant Slide
Beside the highway, the Giant Slide
with its rusty undulations lifts
out of the weeds. It hasn't been used
for a generation. The ticket booth
tilts to that side where the nickels shifted
over the years. A chain link fence keeps out
the children and drunks. Blue morning glories
climb halfway up the stairs, bright clusters
of laughter. Call it a passing fancy,
this slide that nobody slides down now.
Those screams have all gone east
on a wind that will never stop blowing
down from the Rockies and over the plains,
where things catch on for a little while,
bright leaves in a fence, and then are gone.
A Roadside Shrine in Kansas
Sunk into the earth
end up,
as if it had fallen
white as a comet
from heaven,
this bathtub,
clenching its claws
into fists,
now shelters
a Virgin
of plaster,
while through
the rusty drain hole,
one kneeling there
can see
in the shimmering distance,
God
walking the bean rows.
Decoration Day
It takes the hard work
of a dozen ants
to open each bud
of a peony.
For weeks, there they are,
clickety-clack,
biting the sutures
and licking the glue.
Then, one by one
on Decoration Day,
the blossoms explode,
tossing the ants
all over the yard.
Early that morning,
we find these flowers
opened, pink and white,
and in the wet grass,
hundreds of ants
with the staggers, all
watching the sky.
A Monday in May
It rained all weekend,
but today the peaked roofs
are as dusty and warm
as the backs of old donkeys
tied in the sun.
So much alike are our houses,
our lives. Under every eave—
leaf, cobweb, and feather;
and for each front yard
one sentimental maple,
who after a shower has passed,
weeps into her shadow
for hours.
A Buffalo Skull
No fine white bone-sheen now;
a hundred hard years
have worn it away, this stump
washed up on a bar
in the river, its horns
like broken roots,
its muzzle filled with sand
and the thin gray breath
of spider webs. Once,
they covered the grasslands
like the shadows of clouds,
and now the river gives up
just one skull, a hive of bone
like a fallen wasp's nest,
heavy, empty, and
full of the whine of the wind
and old thunder.
Laundry
A pink house trailer,
scuffed and rusted, sunken
in weeds. On the line,
five pale blue workshirts
up to their elbows
in raspberry canes—
a good, clean crew
of pickers,
out early,
sleeves wet with dew,
and near them, a pair
of bright yellow panties
urging them on.
The Mouse
On the floor of a parking garage
I found a dead mouse. It was winter,
the world gone gray outside and in,
and the mouse a part of all that drabness—
the smallest part. He stood
like a windup mouse run down at last
but still on its wheels, a fast run
just behind him, and he'd pulled
his paws up tightly under his chin
as if he'd stopped to sniff at the edge
of something important—a mousehole maybe,
right under his nose and opening
out of the world. His back was arched
against entering there, and every muscle
had frozen in place like a spring.
Ladder
Against the low roof of a house
in the suburbs, someone has left
a ladder leaning, an old wooden ladder
too heavy to take down at night
and put up in the morning, the kind
that reaches beyond such a roof
by a good six feet, punching up
into the sky. The kind with paint
from another world on its rungs,
the cream and butter colored spots
from another time, the kind that
before you get up in the morning
knocks hard at the front of your house
like a sheriff, that stands there
in front of your door with a smile;
a ladder with solid authority,
with its pantlegs pressed, a ladder
that if it could whistle would whistle.
Walking at Noon Near the Burlington Depot in Lincoln, Nebraska
—to the memory of James Wright
On the rat-gray dock
of the candy factory,
workers in caps and aprons
as white as divinity
sit on their heels and smoke
in the warm spring sunlight
thick with butterscotch.
In the next block down,
outside a warehouse,
its big doors rolled and bolted
over the dusty hush
of pyramids of cartons,
two pickets in lettered vests
call back and forth, their voices
a clatter of echoes.
A girl sits in her car,
an old tan Oldsmobile
broken down over its tires,
and plays the radio.
On the grill of a semi
smelling of heat and distance,
one tattered butterfly.
And an empty grocery cart
from Safeway, miles from here,
leans into its reflection
in a blackened window, a little
piano recital of chrome
for someone to whom all things
were full of sadness.
A Patch of Sunlight
Over the old dog's eye,
the blue cloud
of a cataract.
Along one leg, a tremor—
some tiny animal
running in long brown grass.
Carp
On the river bottom,
the carp have blown out
all the candles.
They whisper along
over the closed, black
bibles of clams.
Water-monks these,
with mouths like those
of angels singing,
but not angelic,
so very naked now
in darkness,
their cool, hard bodies
touching, among
the tapestries of weed.
At the Center
In Kansas, on top
of an old piano,
a starfish, dry
as a fancy pastry
left sitting there
during a wedding,
spreads its brown arms
over the foam
of a white lace doily,
reaching for water
in five directions.
A Sunset
The steeple so carefully
swings its long shadow
over the grass that the bell's
small shadow does not ring,
nor do the soft gray shadows
of its pigeons fly. Light
rises into the treetops
like the bubbles in beer.
A man walks home alone,
his shadow, shambling ahead,
some dark old woman
who rents out rooms.
She's wrapped in a shawl
that hides her face
in folds of blackness,
and closed in her fist
is the evening star.
The Ride
—to the memory of John Gardner
High in the night, we rock, we rock in the stars
while the Ferris wheel stops to let someone off
in the darkness below, someone we saw there
a half turn ahead of us, riding alone,
a man with white hair who threw up his hands
going down. We were too frightened for that.
We held on with both hands as we followed him,
climbing and falling, around and around,
while the world turned beneath us, rolled under
the wheel with its music, its flickering lights.
Now we rock in the starlight. Beneath us,
the music has stopped, the motor pops at idle.
The midway goes dark, booth to booth, as he passes.
At Nightfall
In feathers the color of dusk, a swallow,
up under the shadowy eaves of the barn,
weaves now, with skillful beak and chitter,
one bright white feather into her nest
to guide her flight home in the darkness.
It has taken a hundred thousand years
for a bird to learn this one trick with a feather,
a simple thing. And the world is alive
with such innocent progress. But to what
safe place shall any of us return
in the last smoky nightfall,
when we in our madness have put the torch
to the hope in every nest and feather?
At the Office Early
Rain has beaded the panes
of my office windows,
and in each little lens
the bank at the corner
hangs upside down.
What wonderful music
this rain must have made
in the night, a thousand banks
turned over, the change
crashing out of the drawers
and bouncing upstairs
to the roof, the soft
percussion of ferns
dropping out of their pots,
the ball-point pens
popping out of their sockets
in a fluffy snow
of deposit slips.
Now all day long,
as the sun dries the glass,
I'll hear the soft piano
of banks righting themselves,
the underpaid tellers
counting their nickels and dimes.
Cleaning a Bass
She put it on the chopping block
and it flopped a little, the red rick-rack
of its sharp gills sawing the evening air
into lengths, its yellow eyes like glass,
like the eyes of a long-forgotten doll
in the light of an attic. “They feel no pain,”
she told me, setting the fish upright,
and with a chunk of stovewood
she drove an ice pick through its skull
and into the block. The big fish curled
on its pin
like a silver pennant
and then relaxed, but I could see life
in those eyes, which stared at the darkening
world of the air with a terrible wonder.
“It's true,” she said, looking over at me
through the gathering shadows, “they feel no pain,”
and she took her Swedish filleting knife
with its beautiful blade that leaped and flashed
like a fish itself, and with one stroke
laid the bass bare to its shivering spine.
An Empty Shotgun Shell
It's a handsome thing
in its uniform—
all crimson and brass—
standing guard
at the gate to the field,
but something
is wrong at its heart.
It's dark in there,
so dark a whole night
could squeeze in,
could shrink back up in there
like a spider,
a black one
with smoke in its hair.
A Quarter Moon Just Before Dawn
There's sun on the moon's back
as she stoops to pick up
a star that she's dropped in her garden.
And stars keep falling,
through little holes in the bottoms
of her sweater pockets.
She's stretched them out
by hiding her hands all these years—
big peasant's hands
with night under their nails.
A Letter
I have tried a dozen ways
to say those things
and have failed: how the moon
with its bruises
climbs branch over branch
through the empty tree;
how the cool November dusk,
like a wind, has blown
these old gray houses up
against the darkness;
and what these things
have come to mean to me
without you. I raked the yard
this morning, and it rained
this afternoon. Tonight,
along the shiny street,
the bags of leaves—
wet-shouldered
but warm in their skins—
are huddled together, close
so close to life.
Latvian Neighborhood
Along this street,