Kindest Regards. Ted Kooser

      The pigeon flies to her resting place

      on a window ledge above the traffic,

      and her shadow, which cannot fly, climbs

      swiftly over the bricks to meet her there.

      Just so are you and I gathered at 5:00,

      your bicycle left by the porch, the wind

      still ringing in it, and my shoes by the bed,

      still warm from walking home to you.

      Abandoned Farmhouse

      He was a big man, says the size of his shoes

      on a pile of broken dishes by the house;

      a tall man, too, says the length of the bed

      in an upstairs room; and a good, God-fearing man,

      says the Bible with a broken back

      on the floor below the window, dusty with sun;

      but not a man for farming, say the fields

      cluttered with boulders and the leaky barn.

      A woman lived with him, says the bedroom wall

      papered with lilacs and the kitchen shelves

      covered with oilcloth, and they had a child,

      says the sandbox made from a tractor tire.

      Money was scarce, say the jars of plum preserves

      and canned tomatoes sealed in the cellar hole.

      And the winters cold, say the rags in the window frames.

      It was lonely here, says the narrow country road.

      Something went wrong, says the empty house

      in the weed-choked yard. Stones in the field

      say he was not a farmer; the still-sealed jars

      in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste.

      And the child? Its toys are strewn in the yard

      like branches after a storm — a rubber cow,

      a rusty tractor with a broken plow,

      a doll in overalls. Something went wrong, they say.

      At the Bait Stand

      Part barn, part boxcar, part of a chicken shed,

      part leaking water, something partly dead,

      part pop machine, part gas pump, part a chair

      leaned back against the wall, and sleeping there,

      part-owner Herman Runner, mostly fat,

      hip-waders, undershirt, tattoos, and hat.

      The Widow Lester

      I was too old to be married,

      but nobody told me,

      I guess they didn’t care enough.

      How it had hurt, though, catching bouquets

      all those years!

      Then I met Ivan, and kept him,

      and never knew love.

      How his feet stank in the bedsheets!

      I could have told him to wash,

      but I wanted to hold that stink against him.

      The day he dropped dead in the field,

      I was watching.

      I was hanging up sheets in the yard,

      and I finished.

      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 beggar-like 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 birdnest 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 henhouse 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.

      from One World at a Time

      1985

      Flying at Night

      Above us, stars. Beneath 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.

      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

      that finally fit him, through which

      he looks to see you looking back —