Flying At Night Read online

  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,

  Old Ryan, not yours.

  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

  on its end and feebly bending

  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.