Clay:
Thanks for posting that one. It's one I like, and it's in the wonderfully chosen Gioia/Mason/Schoerke 20th Century American Poetry anthology. Here are a couple more not in the anthology but that I still like.
Laundry
A pink house trailer,
scuffed and rusted, sunken
in weeds. On the line,
five pale blue workshirts
up to their elbows
in raspberry canes--
a good, clean crew
of pickers, out early,
sleeves wet with dew,
and near them, a pair
of bright yellow panties
urging them on.
(From the Atlantic Monthly: )
Biker
Pulling away from a stoplight
with a tire's sharp bark,
he lifts his scuffed boot and kicks at the air,
and the old dog of inertia gets up with a growl
and shrinks out of the way.
Home Medical Dictionary
This is not so much a dictionary
as it is an atlas for the old,
in which they pore over
the pink and gray maps of the body,
hoping to find that wayside junction
where a pain-rutted road
intersects with the highway
of answers, and where the slow river
of fear that achingly meanders
from organ to organ
is finally channeled and dammed.
Kooser's low-key use of metaphor and small but telling and vivid details simply blows me away. I truly hope I can write like he does someday.
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Steve Schroeder
[This message has been edited by Steven Schroeder (edited July 09, 2004).]
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