Kindest Regards. Ted Kooser
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live on at the center of myself.
Goodbye
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.
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.
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 for the 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 grille 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.
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?
Cleaning a Bass
She put it on the chopping block
and it flopped a little, the red rickrack
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.
A Letter
I have tried a dozen ways
to say these 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