American Life in Poetry: Column 038

By Ted Kooser
U.S. Poet Laureate
I’d guess that many women remember the risks and thrills of their first romantic encounters in much the same way California poet Leslie Monsour does in this poem.

Fifteen
The boys who fled my father’s house in fear
Of what his wrath would cost them if he found
Them nibbling slowly at his daughter’s ear,
Would vanish out the back without a sound,
And glide just like the shadow of a crow,
To wait beside the elm tree in the snow.
Something quite deadly rumbled in his voice.
He sniffed the air as if he knew the scent
Of teenage boys, and asked, “What was that noise?”
Then I’d pretend to not know what he meant,
Stand mutely by, my heart immense with dread,
As Father set the traps and went to bed.

Reprinted from “The Alarming Beauty of the Sky,” published by Red Hen Press, 2005, by permission of the author. Copyright © 1998 by Leslie Monsour. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

American Life in Poetry: Column 037
By Ted Kooser
U.S. Poet Laureate
Painful separations — through divorce, through death, through alienation — sometimes cause us to focus on the objects around us, often invested with sentiment. Here’s Shirley Buettner, having packed up what’s left of a relationship.

The Wind Chimes
Two wind chimes,
one brass and prone to anger,
one with the throat of an angel,
swing from my porch eave,
sing with the storm.
Last year I lived five months
under that shrill choir,
boxing your house, crowding books
into crates, from some pages
your own voice crying.
Some days the chimes raged.
Some days they hung still.
They fretted when I dug up
the lily I gave you in April,
blooming, strangely, in fall.
Together, they scolded me
when I counted pennies you left
in each can, cup, and drawer,
when I rechecked the closets
for remnants of you.
The last day, the house empty,
resonant with space, the two chimes
had nothing to toll for.
I walked out, took them down,
carried our mute spirits home.

From “Thorns,” published by Juniper Press, 1995. Copyright (c) 1995 by Shirley Buettner and reprinted with permission of the author. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

For several months now, one of the top three destinations on our little Web site has consistently been a paper I wrote in October 2000 for an English class. I pity the fool who’s using that thing as a reference. I can barely get through the first sentence:

In the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale, fourteenth century author Geoffrey Chaucer refutes the popular misogynistic perspective propagated by the religious authorities of his time.

It goes on to say blah-da-di-blah-blah-blah. Huzzah!