In Musty Light

The author of twelve collections of poetry and a Presidential Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Ted Kooser was the United States Poet Laureate from 2004-2006. His 2004 book of poems, Delights & Shadows won the Pulitzer Prize. Before settling down to write full-time he was a life insurance executive. About his poetry, Mr Kooser has said, “I write for other people with the hope that I can help them to see the wonderful things within their everyday experiences. In short, I want to show people how interesting the ordinary world can be if you pay attention.”

The poem below is from his 1985 book, One World at a Time, one which is often hard to find and more than likely expensive when it turns up. The best bet for getting this one is at a garage sale. Or maybe at the goodwill store. In a preface to his poem, the writer said: “I am a devotee of thrift shops and goodwill stores and garage sales and yard sales and so on, and have spent hours and hours in these places—I just love them, I can’t exactly say why. But the following poem describes the basement of a goodwill store in the way I’ve seen them many times.”

IN THE BASEMENT OF THE GOODWILL STORE

In musty light, in the thin brown air
of damp carpet, doll heads and rust,
beneath long rows of sharp footfalls
like nails in a lid, an old man stands
trying on glasses, lifting each pair
from the box like a glittering fish
and holding it up to the light
of a dirty bulb. Near him, a heap
of enameled pans as white as skulls
looms in the catacomb shadows,
and old toilets with dry red throats
cough up bouquets of curtain rods.

You’ve seen him somewhere before.
He's wearing the green leisure suit
you threw out with the garbage,
and the Christmas tie you hated,
and the ventilated wingtip shoes
you found in your father’s closet
and wore as a joke. And the glasses
which finally fit him, through which
he looks to see you looking back—
two mirrors which 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.

The Scent of Roses

Tuesday was a half-day of horrendous traffic across what seemed like most of central Florida, and by the end of it I was ready to swear off driving and seclude myself in a cloister of quiet calm. My houseguest returned to Tokyo today and halfway to the airport we encountered a crash on the interstate that slowed everything to a crawl before detouring all traffic in a wide loop that had us worrying about reaching the airport in time. Avoiding the interstate on the return trip I ran into the same thing on an alternate route back to the beach. Those several hours of fractious driving among tailgating madmen left me eager to park the car, put my feet up and with a quiet view of the ocean read something of a soothing nature. And that’s just the way it turned out.

Robert Bly is the author of twenty-two collections of poetry and has translated thirteen books of poetry as well as one novel. The translations are from Swedish, Norwegian, German, Spanish, Persian and Urdu. He is also the author of nine non-fiction books. Mr Bly won a National Book Award for Poetry with his 1967 collection, The Light Around the Body. He describes his writing as a wish to describe modern American life through powerful metaphors and intense imagery. In 2006 the University of Minnesota purchased Mr Bly’s archive, more than 80,000 pages of handwritten manuscript, his journal spanning nearly fifty years and his correspondence. The university paid a price of $775,000 to acquire this archive. The poem below is from a collection to be published in May, Talking Into the Ear of a Donkey.

THE BLIND OLD MAN

I don't know why so much sweetness hovers around us.
Nor why the wind blows the curtains in the afternoons,
Nor why the earth mutters so much about its children.

We'll never know why the snow falls through the night,
Nor how the heron stretches her long legs,
Nor why we feel so abandoned in the morning.

We have never understood how birds manage to fly,
Nor who the genius is who makes up dreams,
Nor how heaven and earth can appear in a poem.

We don't know why the rain falls so long.
The ditchdigger turns up one shovel after another.
The herons go on stitching the heavens together.

We've never heard about the day we were conceived
Nor the doctor who helped us to be born,
Nor that blind old man who decides when we will die.

It's hard to understand why the sun rises,
And why our children are mostly fond of us,
And why the wind blows the curtains in the afternoon.

A highly regarded poet, Ted Kooser was the US Poet Laureate from 2004-2006. For his book of poems, Delights and Shadows (2004) he won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. Mr Kooser is the Presidential Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the author of twelve full-length collections of poetry. In reviewing his 1994 collection, Weather Central, from which “A Ghost Story” is taken, The Bloomsbury Review described Kooser this way: ‘He sits on his porch, uninterested in academic cant or the fashions of poetic schools, and takes in the world around, praising its quiet beauty…’

A GHOST STORY

Her life was plain, her death
a common death—a girl
sewn into the watery shroud
of pneumonia. She was only
another Mary, there
in Illinois, and it was only
another April—the buds
of the honeysuckle folded
in prayer. Forgotten eyes,
forgotten smile, the cowlick
in her hair forgotten;
everything gone. Yet for
seventy years her grave
gave off the scent of roses.