Kindest Regards. Ted Kooser

      and what these things

      have come to mean to me

      without you. I raked the yard

      this morning, and it rained

      this afternoon. Tonight,

      along the shiny street,

      the bags of leaves —

      wet-shouldered

      but warm in their skins —

      are huddled together, close,

      so close to life.

      The Voyager 2 Satellite

      The tin man is cold;

      the glitter of distant worlds

      is like snow on his coat.

      Free-falling through space,

      he spreads his arms

      and slowly turns,

      hands reaching to catch

      the white, elusive

      dandelion fuzz

      of starlight. He is the dove

      with wings of purest gold

      sent out upon the deep

      to seek a place for us,

      the goat upon whose back

      we’ve sent our problems

      into exile, the dreamy beast

      of peace and silence

      who now grows smaller, smaller,

      falling so gracefully

      into the great blank face

      of God.

      As the President Spoke

      As the President spoke, he raised a finger

      to emphasize something he said. I’ve forgotten

      just what he was saying, but as he spoke

      he glanced at that finger as if it were

      somebody else’s, and his face went slack and gray,

      and he folded his finger back into his hand

      and put it down under the podium

      along with whatever it meant, with whatever he’d seen

      as it spun out and away from that bony axis.

      The Urine Specimen

      In the clinic, a sun-bleached shell of stone

      on the shore of the city, you enter

      the last small chamber, a little closet

      chastened with pearl — cool, white, and glistening —

      and over the chilly well of the toilet

      you trickle your precious sum in a cup.

      It’s as simple as that. But the heat

      of this gold your body’s melted and poured out

      into a form begins to enthrall you,

      warming your hand with your flesh’s fevers

      in a terrible way. It’s like holding

      an organ — spleen or fatty pancreas,

      a lobe from your foamy brain still steaming

      with worry. You know that just outside

      a nurse is waiting to cool it into a gel

      and slice it onto a microscope slide

      for the doctor, who in it will read your future,

      wringing his hands. You lift the chalice and toast

      the long life of your friend there in the mirror,

      who wanly smiles, but does not drink to you.

      Porch Swing in September

      The porch swing hangs fixed in a morning sun

      that bleaches its gray slats, its flowered cushion

      whose flowers have faded, like those of summer,

      and a small brown spider has hung out her web

      on a line between porch post and chain

      so that no one may swing without breaking it.

      She is saying it’s time that the swinging were done with,

      time that the creaking and pinging and popping

      that sang through the ceiling were past,

      time now for the soft vibrations of moths,