Splitting an Order. Ted Kooser
once the news is out, thrown over
your shoulders like a threadbare robe,
you move on cold feet room to room,
feeling as weightless as a soul,
turning on every light in the house,
needing the light all around you
because it’s a new day now, though still
in darkness, hours before dawn,
a day you’ll learn to call that day,
the first morning after it happened.
Swinging from Parents
The child walks between her father and mother,
holding their hands. She makes the shape of the y
at the end of infancy, and lifts her feet
the way the y pulls up its feet, and swings
like the v in love, between an o and an e
who are strong and steady and as far as she knows
will be there to swing from forever. Sometimes
her father, using his free hand, points to something
and says its name, the way the arm of the r
points into the future at the end of father.
Or the r at the end of forever. It’s that forever
the child puts her trust in, lifting her knees,
swinging her feet out over the world.
Potatoes
On a misty, sepia-and-green
May morning, crossing Iowa,
I saw from the highway
a man, a woman, and a horse
out sowing seed potatoes,
using a two-wheeled planter
from a hundred years ago,
the man beneath a straw hat,
holding the horse’s reins
and taking a sight on the posts
at the end of the field,
the woman perched behind,
above the tin potato bin,
watching the steel disc roll along
and fold the earth back under.
The horse was brown as varnish
as it pulled us forward, all
of us, with black clay dropping
from its shoes, and I was
never surer of the world.
At Arby’s, at Noon
Some of us were arriving, hungry,
impatient, while others had eaten
and were leaving, bidding goodbye
to our friends, and among us
stood a pretty young woman, blind,
her perfect fingers interwoven
about the top of her cane,
and she was bending forward,
open eyed, to find the knotted lips
of a man whose disfigured face
had been assembled out of scars
and who was leaving, hurrying off,
and though their kiss was brief
and askew and awkwardly pursed,
we all received it with a kind of
wonder, and kept it on our lips
through the afternoon.
A Meeting after Many Years
Our words were a few colorful leaves
afloat on a very old silence,
the kind with a terrifying undertow,
and we stood right at its edge,
wrapping ourselves in our own arms
because of the chill, and with old voices
called back and forth across all those years
until we could bear it no longer,
and turned from each other,
and walked away into our countries.
The Rollerblader
I saw her coming from a long way off,
that singular, side-to-side, whisk-broom movement
as she swung her arms and legs, brushing
the morning and its inertia aside,
and the dew which throughout the cool night
had settled on the path like starlight.
An old man and woman, too, with their little dog,
were swept off into the grass, lifting their knees,
and they glanced at her hot red face as she passed,
as if they’d known her once, and all that fury.
In a Gift Shop
Only in recent years have I begun
to notice them living among us,
and yesterday there were two more,
the one somewhere in her seventies
and in a wheelchair, and the other
younger by maybe twenty years,
helping the older woman pick out cards
from one of those squeaky revolving
racks in a shop. The older would gesture
with a weak brush of her hand to tell
the younger to turn the rack a little
and the younger would turn it, and both
would study the cards from the top
to the bottom, and once in a while
the younger would take a card down
and show it to the other, holding it
closed and then open, and the older
might nod to agree that it seemed
the right choice, or she might dismiss it
with a shake of her head with its thin
white hair, and the younger would
patiently put it back, and this went on
for what seemed a very long while
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