Kindest Regards. Ted Kooser
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mirrors that flash and glance —
are those through which one day
you too will look down over the years,
when you have grown old and thin
and no longer particular,
and the things you once thought
you were rid of forever
have taken you back in their arms.
In January, 1962
With his hat on the table before him,
my grandfather waited until it was time
to go to my grandmother’s funeral.
Beyond the window, his eighty-eighth winter
lay white in its furrows. The little creek
that cut through his cornfield was frozen.
Past the creek and the broken, brown stubble,
on a hill that thirty years before
he’d given the town, a green tent flapped
under the cedars. Throughout the day before,
he’d stayed there by the window watching
the blue woodsmoke from the thawing-barrels
catch in the bitter wind and vanish,
and had seen, so small in the distance,
a man breaking the earth with a pick.
I suppose he could feel that faraway work
in his hands — the steel-smooth, cold oak handle;
the thick, dull shock at the wrists —
for the following morning, as we waited there,
it was as if it hurt him to move them,
those hard old hands that lay curled and still
near the soft gray felt hat on the table.
Father
Theodore Briggs Kooser
May 19, 1902–December 31, 1979
You spent fifty-five years
walking the hard floors
of the retail business:
first, as a boy playing store
in your grandmother’s barn,
sewing feathers on hats
the neighbors had thrown out,
then stepping out onto
the smooth pine planks
of your uncle’s grocery —
SALADA TEA in gold leaf
over the door, your uncle
and father still young then
in handlebar mustaches,
white aprons with dusters
tucked into their sashes —
then to the varnished oak
of a dry goods store —
music to your ears,
that bumpety-bump
of bolts of bright cloth
on the counter tops,
the small rattle of buttons,
the bell in the register —
then on to the cold tile
of a bigger store, and then one
still bigger — gray carpet,
wide aisles, a new town
to get used to — then into
retirement, a few sales
in your own garage,
the concrete under your feet.
You had good legs, Dad,
and a good storekeeper’s eye:
asked once if you remembered
a teacher of mine,
you said, “I certainly do;
size 10, a little something
in blue.” How you loved
what you’d done with your life!
Now you’re gone, and the clerks
are lazy, the glass cases
smudged, the sale sweaters
pulled off on the floor.
But what good times we had
before it was over:
after those stores had closed,
you posing as customers,
strutting in big, flowered hats,
those aisles like a stage,
the pale mannequins watching;
we laughed till we cried.
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
that 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.
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