A letter in October

Dawn comes later and later now,

and I, who only a month ago

could sit with coffee every morning

watching the light walk down the hill

to the edge of the pond and place

a doe there, shyly drinking,



then see the light step out upon

the water, sowing reflections

to either side—a garden

of trees that grew as if by magic—

now see no more than my face,

mirrored by darkness, pale and odd,



startled by time. While I slept,

night in its thick winter jacket

bridled the doe with a twist

of wet leaves and led her away,

then brought its black horse with harness

that creaked like a cricket, and turned



the water garden under. I woke,

and at the waiting window found

the curtains open to my open face;

beyond me, darkness. And I,

who only wished to keep looking out,

must now keep looking in.

After Years

Today, from a distance, I saw you

walking away, and without a sound

the glittering face of a glacier

slid into the sea. An ancient oak

fell in the Cumberlands, holding only

a handful of leaves, and an old woman

scattering corn to her chickens looked up

for an instant. At the other side

of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times

the size of our own sun exploded

and vanished, leaving a small green spot

on the astronomer's retina

as he stood on the great open dome

of my heart with no one to tell.

Old Lilacs

Through early April cold,


these thin gray horses

have come near the house

as to a fence, and lean there

hungry for summer,

nodding their heads

with a nickering of twigs.



Their long legs are dusty

from standing for months

in winter’s stall, and their eyes

are like a cloudy sky

seen through bare branches.



They are waiting for May

to come up from the barn

with her overalls pockets

stuffed from the fodder

of green. In a month

they will be slow and heavy,

their little snorts so sweet

you’ll want to stand

among them, breathing.

In an Old Apple Orchard

The wind’s an old man
to this orchard; these trees
have been feeling
the soft tug of his gloves
for a hundred years.
Now it’s April again,
and again that old fool
thinks he’s young.
He’s combed the dead leaves
out of his beard; he’s put on
perfume. He’s gone off
late in the day
toward the town, and come back
slow in the morning,
reeling with bees.
As late as noon, if you look
in the long grass,you can see him
still rolling about in his sleep.

Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry

The moon put her white hands
on my shoulders, looked into my face,
and without a word
sent me into the night.

A Happy Birthday

This evening, I sat by an open window
and read till the light was gone
and the book was no more than a part of the darkness.
I could have easily switched on a lamp,
but I wanted to ride this day
down into night,
to sit alone and smooth the unreadable page
with the pale gray ghost of my hand.

Pocket Poem

If this comes creased and creased again and soiled
as if I'd opened it a thousand times
to see if what I'd written here was right
it's all because I looked too long for you
to put in your pocket. Midnight says
the little gifts of loneliness come wrapped
by nervous fingers. What I wanted this
to say was that I want to be so close
that when you find it, it is warm from me.

~Ted Kooser

I read and re-read this one many times in many bookstores. It's from his book "Valentines." He's written many such poems and dedicated them to his female friends.
Sigh.

Late September

Behind each garage a ladder
sleeps in the leaves, its hands
folded across its lean belly.
There are hundreds of them
in each town, and more
sleeping by haystacks and barns
out in the country---tough old
day laborers, seasoned and wheezy,
drunk on the weather,
sleeping outside with the crickets.

~ted kooser

february 4 clear and windy

I saw a dust devil this morning,
doing a dance with veils of cornshucks
in front of an empty farmhouse,
a magical thing, and I remembered
walking the beans in hot midsummer,
how we'd see one swirling toward us
over the field, a spiral of flying leaves
forty or fifty feet high, clear as a glass
of cold water just out of reach,
and we'd drop our hoes and run to catch it,
shouting and laughing, hurdling the beans,
and if one of us was fast enough,
and lucky, he'd run along inside the funnel,
where the air was strangely cool and still,
the soul and center of the thing,
the genie who swirls out of the bottle,
eager to grant one wish to each of us.
I had a hundred thousand wishes then.

~from Ted Kooser's Winter Morning Walks.
Love the last line.

Flying at Night

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like
his.

~Ted Kooser

a box of pastels

I once held on my knees a simple wooden box

in which a rainbow lay dusty and broken.

It was a set of pastels that had years before

belonged to the painter Mary Cassatt,

and all of the colors she'd used in her work

lay open before me. Those hues she'd most used,

the peaches and pinks, were worn down to stubs,

while the cool colors--violet, ultramarine--

had been set, scarcely touched, to one side.

She'd had little patience with darkness, and her heart

held only a measure of shadow. I touched

the warm dust of those colors, her tools,

and left there with light on the tips of my fingers.

-Ted Kooser