Flying At Night Read online

  poor iron in the nails that

  were all to blame for the barn's collapse

  on everything he owned, thus

  leading poor Tom's good health

  to diabetes and

  the swollen leg that threw him

  off the silo, probably

  dead (the doctor said)

  before he hit that board pile.

  My Grandfather Dying

  I could see bruises or shadows

  deep under his skin, like the shapes

  skaters find frozen in rivers—

  leaves caught in flight,

  or maybe the hand of a man reaching up

  out of the darkness for help.

  I was helpless as flowers

  there at his bedside. I watched

  his legs jerk in the sheets.

  He answered doors,

  he kicked loose stones from his fields.

  I leaned down to call out my name

  and he called it back. His breath

  was as sour as an orchard

  after the first frost.

  The Red Wing Church

  There's a tractor in the doorway of a church

  in Red Wing, Nebraska, in a coat of mud

  and straw that drags the floor. A broken plow

  sprawls beggarlike behind it on some planks

  that make a sort of roadway up the steps.

  The steeple's gone. A black tar-paper scar

  that lightning might have made replaces it.

  They've taken it down to change the house of God

  to Homer Johnson's barn, but it's still a church,

  with clumps of tiger lilies in the grass

  and one of those boxlike, glassed-in signs

  that give the sermon's topic (reading now

  a bird's nest and a little broken glass).

  The good works of the Lord are all around:

  the steeple top is standing in a garden

  just up the alley; it's a hen house now:

  fat leghorns gossip at its crowded door.

  Pews stretch on porches up and down the street,

  the stained-glass windows style the mayor's house,

  and the bell's atop the firehouse in the square.

  The cross is only God knows where.

  Highway 30

  At two in the morning, when the moon

  has driven away,

  leaving the faint taillight of one star

  at the horizon, a light

  like moonlight leaks

  from broken crates that lie fallen

  along the highway, becoming

  motels, all-night cafes, and bus stations

  with greenhouse windows,

  where lone women sit like overturned flowerpots,

  crushing the soft, gray petals of old coats.

  Birthday

  Somebody deep in my bones

  is lacing his shoes with a hook.

  It's an hour before dawn

  in that nursing home.

  There is nothing to do but get dressed

  and sit in the darkness.

  Up the hall, in the brightly lit skull,

  the young pastor is writing his poem.

  The Failed Suicide

  You have come back to us windblown

  and wild-eyed, your fingertips numb

  from squeezing the handle grips

  of a four-day coma. Somehow,

  out in that darkened countryside,

  the road grew circular

  and brought you back. We seem

  another city, but the street signs

  keep spelling your name, the same gnats

  keep clouding the lights

  high over the empty parking lots,

  and the clock on the funeral home

  (always a few minutes fast)

  shines down upon a little fountain

  where, nestled in curls of dead leaves,

  a stone frog the color of your brain

  prepares his leap.

  The Goldfish Floats to the Top of His Life

  The goldfish floats to the top of his life

  and turns over, a shaving from somebody's hobby.

  So it is that men die at the whims of great companies,

  their neckties pulling them speechless into machines,

  their wives finding them slumped in the shower,

  their hearts blown open like boiler doors.

  In the night, again and again these men float

  to the tops of their dreams to drift back

  to their desks in the morning. If you ask them,

  they all would prefer to have died in their sleep.

  They Had Torn Off My Face at the Office

  They had torn off my face at the office.

  The night that I finally noticed

  that it was not growing back, I decided

  to slit my wrists. Nothing ran out;

  I was empty. Both of my hands fell off

  shortly thereafter. Now at my job

  they allow me to type with the stumps.

  It pleases them to have helped me,

  and I gain in speed and confidence.

  Year's End

  Now the seasons are closing their files

  on each of us, the heavy drawers

  full of certificates rolling back

  into the tree trunks, a few old papers

  flocking away. Someone we loved

  has fallen from our thoughts,

  making a little, glittering splash

  like a bicycle pushed by a breeze.

  Otherwise, not much has happened;

  we fell in love again, finding

  that one red feather on the wind.

  New Year's Day

  Each thing in the clean morning light

  is a promise. I start the day

  by building a feeding place for the birds,

  stacking up castaway crates in the snow.

  How they come! Sparrows and blue jays

  dropping like leaves from the elms,

  which though burned with disease

  still promise some sort of a spring,

  their branches lined with hard buds

  like birds perching, or the seeds of birds,

  still more birds to come.

  Walking to Work

  Today, it's the obsidian

  ice on the sidewalk

  with its milk white bubbles

  popping under my shoes

  that pleases me, and upon it

  a lump of old snow

  with a trail like a comet,

  that somebody,

  probably falling in love,

  has kicked

  all the way to the corner.

  Sunday Morning

  Now it is June again, one of those

  leafy Sundays drifting through galaxies

  of maple seeds. Somewhere, a mourning dove

  touches her keyboard twice, a lonely F,

  and then falls silent. Here in the house

  the Sunday papers lie in whitecaps

  over the living-room floor. Among them floats

  the bridal page, that window of many panes,

  reflecting, black and white, patches of sky

  and puffs of starlit cloud becoming

  faces. On each bright brow the same light falls,

  the nuptial moon held up just out of sight

  to the left. The brides all lift their eyes

  and smile to see the heavens stopped for them.

  And love is everywhere. Cars that have all week

  lurched and honked with sour commuters are now

  like smooth canoes packed soft with families.

  A church bell strides through the green perfume

  of locust trees and tolls its thankfulness.

  The mourning dove, to her astonishment,

  blunders upon a distant call in answer.

  One World at a Time

  Flying at Night

  Above us, stars. Benea
th 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.

  A Fencerow in Early March

  The last snowdrifts

  have drawn themselves up

  out of the light,

  clinging to winter.

  Beyond them,

  a muddy stubble field

  has sponged up

  all the darkness—

  the February nights,

  the iron stoves,

  the ink of every letter

  written in longing.

  And the fencerow

  goes on, up and over

  the next low rise

  and the next, casting

  a cold, white shadow,

  each gate still closed

  to spring.

  Just Now

  Just now, if I look back down

  the cool street of the past, I can see

  streetlamps, one for each year,

  lighting small circles of time

  into which someone will step

  if I squint, if I try hard enough—

  circles smaller and smaller,

  leading back to the one faint point

  at the start, like a star.

  So many of them are empty now,

  those circles of roadside and grass.

  In one, the moth of some feeling

  still flutters, unspoken,

  the cold darkness around it enormous.

  A Birthday Card

  In her eighties now, and weak and ill

  with emphysema, my aunt sends me

  a birthday card—a tossing ocean

  with clipper ship—and wishes me

  well at forty-four. She's included

  a note—hard-bitten in ball-point,

  with a pen that sometimes skips whole words

  but never turns back—to tell me

  her end of the news: how the steroids

  have softened her spine, and now how

  every x-ray shows more shattered bone.

  Her hasty words skip in and out,

  their little grooves washed clean of ink,

  the message rising and falling

  like short-wave radio, sending

  this hurried SOS, with love.

  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.

  Camera

  It's an old box camera,

  a Brownie, the color and shape

  of the battery out of a car,

  but smaller, lighter.

  All the good times—

  the clumsy picnics on the grass,

  the new Dodge,

  the Easter Sundays—

  each with its own clear instant

  in the fluid of time,

  all these have leaked away,

  leaving this shell,

  this little battery without a spark.

  A Room in the Past

  It's a kitchen. Its curtains fill

  with a morning light so bright

  you can't see beyond its windows

  into the afternoon. A kitchen

  falling through time with its things

  in their places, the dishes jingling

  up in the cupboard, the bucket

  of drinking water rippled as if

  a truck had just gone past, but that truck

  was thirty years. No one's at home

  in this room. Its counter is wiped,

  and the dishrag hangs from its nail,

  a dry leaf. In housedresses of mist,

  blue aprons of rain, my grandmother

  moved through this life like a ghost,

  and when she had finished her years,

  she put them all back in their places

  and wiped out the sink, turning her back

  on the rest of us, forever.

  In January, 1962

  With his hat on the table before him,

  my grandfather waited until it was time

  to go to my grandmother's funeral.

  Beyond the window, his eighty-eighth winter

  lay white in its furrows. The little creek

  which cut through his cornfield was frozen.

  Past the creek and the broken, brown stubble,

  on a hill which thirty years before

  he'd given the town, a green tent flapped

  under the cedars. Throughout the day before,

  he'd stayed there by the window watching

  the blue woodsmoke from the thawing-barrels

  catch in the bitter wind and vanish,

  and had seen, so small in the distance,

  a man breaking the earth with a pick.

  I suppose he could feel that faraway work

  in his hands—the steel-smooth, cold oak handle;

  the thick, dull shock at the wrists—

  for the following morning, as we waited there,

  it was as if it hurt him to move them,

  those hard old hands which lay curled and still

  near the soft gray felt hat on the table.

  Tillage Marks

  On this flat stone,

  too heavy for one man alone

  to pick up and carry

  to the edge of his field,

  are the faint white marks

  of a plow, one plow

  or many, the sharp blade

  crisscrossing its face

  like a lesson scratched there

  in chalk, the same lesson

  taught over and over,

  to one man alone in his field

  for fifty or sixty years,

  or to fifty such men,

  each alone, each plow striking

  this stone, in this field

  which he thought to be his.

  A Child's Grave Marker

  A small block of granite

  engraved with her name and the dates

  just wasn't quite pretty enough

  for this lost little girl

  or her parents, who added a lamb

  cast in plaster of paris,

  using the same kind of cake mold

  my grandmother had—iron,

  heavy and black as a skillet.

  The lamb came out coconut-white,

  and seventy years have proven it

  soft in the rain. On this hill, />
  overlooking a river in Iowa,

  it melts in its own sweet time.

  Father

  —Theodore Briggs Kooser

  May 19,1902—December 31, 1979

  You spent fifty-five years

  walking the hard floors

  of the retail business,

  first, as a boy playing store

  in your grandmother's barn,

  sewing feathers on hats

  that the neighbors threw out,

  then stepping out onto

  the smooth pine planks

  of your uncle's grocery—

  SALADA TEA in gold leaf

  over the door, your uncle

  and father still young then

  in handlebar mustaches,

  white aprons with dusters

  tucked into their sashes—

  then to the varnished oak

  of a dry goods store—

  music to your ears,

  that bumpety-bump

  of bolts of bright cloth

  on the counter tops,

  the small rattle of buttons,

  the bell in the register—

  then on to the cold tile

  of a bigger store, and then one

  still bigger—gray carpet,

  wide aisles, a new town

  to get used to—then into

  retirement, a few sales

  in your own garage,

  the concrete under your feet.

  You had good legs, Dad,

  and a good storekeeper's eye:

  asked once if you remembered

  a teacher of mine,

  you said, “I certainly do;

  size ten, a little something

  in blue.” How you loved

  what you'd done with your life!

  Now you're gone, and the clerks

  are lazy, the glass cases

  smudged, the sale sweaters

  pulled off on the floor.

  But what good times we had

  before it was over:

  after those stores had closed,

  you posing as customers,

  strutting in big flowered hats,

  those aisles like a stage,

  the pale manikins watching;

  we laughed till we cried.

  At Midnight

  Somewhere in the night,

  a dog is barking,