Kindest Regards. Ted Kooser

live on at the center of myself.

      Goodbye

      You lean with one arm out

      against the porch post,

      your big hand cupping its curve,

      shy of that handshake

      we both know is coming.

      And when we’ve said enough,

      when the last small promises

      begin to repeat, your eyes

      come to mine, and then

      you offer your hand,

      dusted with chalk from the post,

      and sticky with parting.

      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.

      Ladder

      Against the low roof of a house

      in the suburbs, someone has left

      a ladder leaning, an old wooden ladder

      too heavy to take down for the night

      and put up in the morning, the kind

      that reaches beyond such a roof

      by a good six feet, punching up

      into the sky. The kind with paint

      from another world on its rungs,

      the cream- and butter-colored spots

      from another time, the kind that

      before you get up in the morning

      knocks hard at the front of your house

      like a sheriff, that stands there

      in front of your door with a smile;

      a ladder with solid authority,

      with its pantlegs pressed, a ladder

      that if it could whistle would whistle.

      Walking at Noon near the Burlington Depot in Lincoln, Nebraska

       To the memory of James Wright

      On the rat-gray dock

      of the candy factory,

      workers in caps and aprons

      as white as divinity

      sit on their heels and smoke

      in the warm spring sunlight

      thick with butterscotch.

      In the next block down,

      outside a warehouse,

      its big doors rolled and bolted

      over the dusty hush

      of pyramids of cartons,

      two pickets in lettered vests

      call back and forth, their voices

      a clatter of echoes.

      A girl sits in her car,

      an old tan Oldsmobile

      broken down over its tires,

      and plays the radio.

      On the grille of a semi

      smelling of heat and distance,

      one tattered butterfly.

      And an empty grocery cart

      from Safeway, miles from here,

      leans into its reflection

      in a blackened window, a little

      piano recital of chrome

      for someone to whom all things

      were full of sadness.

      At Nightfall

      In feathers the color of dusk, a swallow,

      up under the shadowy eaves of the barn,

      weaves now, with skillful beak and chitter,

      one bright white feather into her nest

      to guide her flight home in the darkness.

      It has taken a hundred thousand years

      for a bird to learn this one trick with a feather,

      a simple thing. And the world is alive

      with such innocent progress. But to what

      safe place shall any of us return

      in the last smoky nightfall,

      when we in our madness have put the torch

      to the hope in every nest and feather?

      Cleaning a Bass

      She put it on the chopping block

      and it flopped a little, the red rickrack

      of its sharp gills sawing the evening air

      into lengths, its yellow eyes like glass,

      like the eyes of a long-forgotten doll

      in the light of an attic. “They feel no pain,”

      she told me, setting the fish upright,

      and with a chunk of stovewood

      she drove an ice pick through its skull

      and into the block. The big fish curled

      on its pin like a silver pennant

      and then relaxed, but I could see life

      in those eyes, which stared at the darkening

      world of the air with a terrible wonder.

      “It’s true,” she said, looking over at me

      through the gathering shadows, “they feel no pain,”

      and she took her Swedish filleting knife

      with its beautiful blade that leaped and flashed

      like a fish itself, and with one stroke

      laid the bass bare to its shivering spine.

      A Letter

      I have tried a dozen ways

      to say these things

      and have failed: how the moon

      with its bruises

      climbs branch over branch

      through the empty tree;

      how the cool November dusk,

      like a wind, has blown

      these old gray houses up

      against