Pitt Poetry Series
Ed Ochester, Editor
Flying at Night
POEMS 1965–1985
Ted Kooser
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS
The publication of this book is supported by a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts
Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260
Copyright © 1980, 1985, Ted Kooser
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper
ISBN 0-8229-4258-5 cloth / 0-8229-5877-5 paper
ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-9107-6 (electronic)
Contents
SURE SIGNS
Selecting a Reader
First Snow
An Old Photograph
The Constellation Orion
The Salesman
Old Soldiers' Home
Self-Portrait at Thirty-Nine
Christmas Eve
Visiting Mountains
The Leaky Faucet
A Frozen Stream
Living Near the Rehabilitation Home
Late February
A Drive in the Country
Spring Plowing
Sitting All Evening Alone in the Kitchen
Sure Signs
A Summer Night
In a Country Cemetery in Iowa
The Man with the Hearing Aid
The Very Old
Walking Beside a Creek
Book Club
At the End of the Weekend
Uncle Adler
In the Corners of Fields
How to Make Rhubarb Wine
Late Lights in Minnesota
The Afterlife
A Widow
So This Is Nebraska
Fort Robinson
How to Foretell a Change in the Weather
Snow Fence
In an Old Apple Orchard
An Empty Place
After the Funeral: Cleaning Out the Medicine Cabinet
The Grandfather Cap
Shooting a Farmhouse
Beer Bottle
Sleeping Cat
North of Alliance
Late September
Carrie
For a Friend
Grandfather
Looking for You, Barbara
Pocket Poem
Moles
Notes on the Death of Nels Paulssen, Farmer, at the Ripe Old Age of 93
Advice
After My Grandmother's Funeral
A Hot Night in Wheat Country
Five P. M.
Abandoned Farmhouse
The Blind Always Come as Such a Surprise
Furnace
West Window
Boarding House
A Letter from Aunt Belle
At the Bait Stand
The Tattooed Lady
A Death at the Office
There Is Always a Little Wind
The Widow Lester
Houses at the Edge of Town
The Old Woman
A Place in Kansas
Tom Ball's Barn
My Grandfather Dying
The Red Wing Church
Highway 30
Birthday
The Failed Suicide
The Goldfish Floats to the Top of His Life
They Had Torn Off My Face at the Office
Year's End
New Year's Day
Walking to Work
Sunday Morning
ONE WORLD AT A TIME
Flying at Night
A Fencerow in Early March
Just Now
A Birthday Card
In the Basement of the Goodwill Store
Camera
A Room in the Past
In January, 1962
Tillage Marks
A Child's Grave Marker
Father
At Midnight
Central
The Fan in the Window
Myrtle
Daddy Longlegs
Good-bye
The Giant Slide
A Roadside Shrine in Kansas
Decoration Day
A Monday in May
A Buffalo Skull
Laundry
The Mouse
Ladder
Walking at Noon Near the Burlington Depot in Lincoln, Nebraska
A Patch of Sunlight
Carp
At the Center
A Sunset
The Ride
At Nightfall
At the Office Early
Cleaning a Bass
An Empty Shotgun Shell
A Quarter Moon Just Before Dawn
A Letter
Latvian Neighborhood
The Voyager II Satellite
The Witness
As the President Spoke
The Pitch
The Sigh
The Onion Woman
Hobo Jungle
An August Night
The Urine Specimen
Geronimo's Mirror
Porch Swing in September
Sure Signs
Selecting a Reader
First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
“For that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat cleaned.” And she will.
First Snow
The old black dog comes in one evening
with the first few snowflakes on his back
and falls asleep, throwing his bad leg out
at our excitement. This is the night
when one of us gets to say, as if it were news,
that no two snowflakes are ever alike;
the night when each of us remembers something
snowier. The kitchen is a kindergarten
steamy with stories. The dog gets stiffly up
and limps away, seeking a quiet spot
at the heart of the house. Outside,
in silence, with diamonds in his fur,
the winter night curls round the legs of the trees,
sleepily blinking snowflakes from his lashes.
An Old Photograph
This old couple, Nils and Lydia,
were married for seventy years.
Here they are sixty years old
and already like brother
and sister—small, lustreless eyes,
large ears, the same serious line
to the mouths. After those years
spent together, sharing
the weather of sex, the sour milk
of lost children, barns burning,
grasshoppers, fevers and silence,
they were beginning to share
their hard looks. How far apart
they sit; not touching at shoulder
or knee, hands clasped in their laps
as if under each pair was a key
to a trunk hidden somewhere,
full of those lessons one keeps
to himself.
They had probably
risen at daybreak, and dressed
by the stove, Lydia wearing
black wool with a collar of lace,
Nils his worn suit. They had driven
to town in the wagon and climbed
to the
studio only to make
this stern statement, now veined
like a leaf, that though they looked
just alike they were separate people,
with separate wishes already
gone stale, a good two feet of space
between them, thirty years to go.
The Constellation Orion
I'm delighted to see you,
old friend,
lying there in your hammock
over the next town.
You were the first person
my son was to meet in the heavens.
He's sleeping now,
his head like a small sun in my lap.
Our car whizzes along in the night.
If he were awake, he'd say,
“Look, Daddy, there's Old Ryan!”
but I won't wake him.
He's mine for the weekend,
The Salesman
Today he's wearing his vinyl shoes,
shiny and white as little Karmann Ghias
fresh from the body shop, and as he moves
in his door-to-door glide, these shoes fly round
each other, honking the horns of their soles.
His hose are black and ribbed and tight, as thin
as an old umbrella or the wing of a bat.
(They leave a pucker when he pulls them off.)
He's got on his double-knit leisure suit
in a pond-scum green, with a tight white belt
that matches his shoes but suffers with cracks
at the golden buckle. His shirt is brown
and green, like a pile of leaves, and it opens
onto the neck at a Brillo pad
of graying hair which tosses a cross and chain
as he walks. The collar is splayed out over
the jacket's lapels yet leaves a lodge pin
taking the sun like a silver spike.
He's swinging a briefcase full of the things
of this world, a leather cornucopia
heavy with promise. Through those dark lenses,
each of the doors along your sunny street
looks slightly ajar, and in your quiet house
the dog of your willpower cowers and growls,
then crawls in under the basement steps,
making the jingle of coin with its tags.
Old Soldiers' Home
On benches in front of the Old Soldiers' Home,
the old soldiers unwrap the pale brown packages
of their hands, folding the fingers back
and looking inside, then closing them up again
and gazing off across the grounds,
safe with the secret.
Self-Portrait at Thirty-Nine
A barber is cutting the hair;
his fingers, perfumed by a rainbow
of bottled oils, blanket the head
with soft, pink clouds. Through these,
the green eyes, from their craters, peer.
There's a grin lost somewhere
in the folds of the face, with a fence
of old teeth, broken and leaning,
through which asides to the barber
pounce catlike onto the air.
This is a face which shows its age,
has all of the coin it started with,
with the look of having been counted
too often. Oh, but I love
my face! It is that hound of bronze
who faithfully stands by the door
to hold it open wide—on light,
on water, on leafy streets
where women pass it with a smile.
Good dog, old face; good dog, good dog.
Christmas Eve
Now my father carries his old heart
in its basket of ribs
like a child coming into the room
with an injured bird.
Our ages sit down with a table between them,
eager to talk.
Our common bones are wrapped in new robes.
A common pulse tugs at the ropes
in the backs of our hands.
We are so much alike
we both weep at the end of his stories.
Visiting Mountains
The plains ignore us,
but these mountains listen,
an audience of thousands
holding its breath
in each rock. Climbing,
we pick our way
over the skulls of small talk.
On the prairies below us,
the grass leans this way and that
in discussion;
words fly away like corn shucks
over the fields.
Here, lost in a mountain's
attention, there's nothing to say.
The Leaky Faucet
All through the night, the leaky faucet
searches the stillness of the house
with its radar blip: who is awake?
Who lies out there as full of worry
as a pan in the sink? Cheer up,
cheer up, the little faucet calls,
someone will help you through your life.
A Frozen Stream
This snake has gone on,
all muscle and glitter,
into the woods,
a few leaves clinging,
red, yellow, and brown.
Oh, how he sparkled!
The roots of the old trees
gleamed as he passed.
Now there is nothing
to see; an old skin
caught in the bushes,
bleached and flaking,
a few sharp stones
already poking through.
Living Near the Rehabilitation Home
Tonight she is making her way
up the block by herself, throwing
her heavy shoes from step to step,
her lunchbox swinging out wide
with a rhythmical clunk, each bone
into her pitiful gait. Where is
her friend tonight, the idiot boy?
Each day at this time I see them
walking together, his bright red jacket
trying the dusk, her old blue coat
his shadow. She moves too slowly
for him, and he breaks from her hand
and circles her in serious orbits,
stamping his feet in the grass.
Perhaps they have taken him elsewhere
to live. From high on my good legs
I imagine her lonely without him,
but perhaps she's happy at last.
Late February
The first warm day,
and by mid-afternoon
the snow is no more
than a washing
strewn over the yards,
the bedding rolled in knots
and leaking water,
the white shirts lying
under the evergreens.
Through the heaviest drifts
rise autumn's fallen
bicycles, small carnivals
of paint and chrome,
the Octopus
and Tilt-A-Whirl
beginning to turn
in the sun. Now children,
stiffened by winter
and dressed, somehow,
like old men, mutter
and bend to the work
of building dams.
But such a spring is brief;
by five o'clock
the chill of sundown,
darkness, the blue TVs
flashing like storms
in the picture windows,
the yards gone gray,
the wet dogs barking
at nothing. Far off
across the cornfields
staked for streets and sewers,
the body of a farmer
missing since fall
will show up
&nbs
p; in his garden tomorrow,
as unexpected
as a tulip.
A Drive in the Country
In the ditch by the dirt back road
late in March, a few black snowdrifts
lie in the grass like old men
asleep in their coats. It's the dirt
of the road that has kept them
so cold at the heart. We drive by
without stopping for them.
Spring Plowing
West of Omaha the freshly plowed fields
steam in the night like lakes.
The smell of the earth floods over the roads.
The field mice are moving their nests
to the higher ground of fence rows,
the old among them crying out to the owls
to take them all. The paths in the grass
are loud with the squeak of their carts.
They keep their lanterns covered.
Sitting All Evening Alone in the Kitchen
The cat has fallen asleep,
the dull book of a dead moth
loose in his paws.
The moon in the window, the tide
gurgling out through the broken shells
in the old refrigerator.
Late, I turn out the lights.
The little towns on top of the stove
glow faintly neon,
sad women alone at the bar.
Sure Signs
—for George Von Glahn
So many crickets tonight—
like strings of sleigh bells!
“A long hard winter ahead
for sure,” my neighbor says,
reeling a cobweb onto
a broom in his garden.
“Crickets and cobwebs,” he says,
“sure signs. In seventy years
(he looks out over his glasses
to see if I'm still there)
you get to know a thing or two.”
A Summer Night
At the end of the street
a porch light is burning,
showing the way. How simple,
how perfect it seems: the darkness,
the white house like a passage
through summer and into
a snowfield. Night after night,
the lamp comes on at dusk,
the end of the street
stands open and white,
and an old woman sits there
tending the lonely gate.