Kindest Regards - Ted Kooser

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mirrors that flash and glance —

      are those through which one day

      you too will look down over the years,

      when you have grown old and thin

      and no longer particular,

      and the things you once thought

      you were rid of forever

      have taken you back in their arms.

      In January, 1962

      With his hat on the table before him,

      my grandfather waited until it was time

      to go to my grandmother’s funeral.

      Beyond the window, his eighty-eighth winter

      lay white in its furrows. The little creek

      that cut through his cornfield was frozen.

      Past the creek and the broken, brown stubble,

      on a hill that thirty years before

      he’d given the town, a green tent flapped

      under the cedars. Throughout the day before,

      he’d stayed there by the window watching

      the blue woodsmoke from the thawing-barrels

      catch in the bitter wind and vanish,

      and had seen, so small in the distance,

      a man breaking the earth with a pick.

      I suppose he could feel that faraway work

      in his hands — the steel-smooth, cold oak handle;

      the thick, dull shock at the wrists —

      for the following morning, as we waited there,

      it was as if it hurt him to move them,

      those hard old hands that lay curled and still

      near the soft gray felt hat on the table.

      Father

       Theodore Briggs Kooser

       May 19, 1902–December 31, 1979

      You spent fifty-five years

      walking the hard floors

      of the retail business:

      first, as a boy playing store

      in your grandmother’s barn,

      sewing feathers on hats

      the neighbors had thrown out,

      then stepping out onto

      the smooth pine planks

      of your uncle’s grocery —

      SALADA TEA in gold leaf

      over the door, your uncle

      and father still young then

      in handlebar mustaches,

      white aprons with dusters

      tucked into their sashes —

      then to the varnished oak

      of a dry goods store —

      music to your ears,

      that bumpety-bump

      of bolts of bright cloth

      on the counter tops,

      the small rattle of buttons,

      the bell in the register —

      then on to the cold tile

      of a bigger store, and then one

      still bigger — gray carpet,

      wide aisles, a new town

      to get used to — then into

      retirement, a few sales

      in your own garage,

      the concrete under your feet.

      You had good legs, Dad,

      and a good storekeeper’s eye:

      asked once if you remembered

      a teacher of mine,

      you said, “I certainly do;

      size 10, a little something

      in blue.” How you loved

      what you’d done with your life!

      Now you’re gone, and the clerks

      are lazy, the glass cases

      smudged, the sale sweaters

      pulled off on the floor.

      But what good times we had

      before it was over:

      after those stores had closed,

      you posing as customers,

      strutting in big, flowered hats,

      those aisles like a stage,

      the pale mannequins watching;

      we laughed till we cried.

      The Fan in the Window

      It is September, and a cool breeze

      from somewhere ahead is turning the blades;

      night, and the slow flash of the fan

      the last light between us and the darkness.

      Dust has begun to collect on the blades,

      haymaker’s dust from distant fields,

      dust riding to town on the night-black wings

      of the crows, a thin frost of dust

      that clings to the fan in just the way

      we cling to the earth as it spins.

      The fan has brought us through,

      its shiny blades like the screw of a ship

      that has pushed its way through summer —

      cut flowers awash in its wake,

      the stagnant Sargasso Sea of July

      far behind us. For the moment, we rest,

      we lie in the dark hull of the house,

      we rock in the troughs off the shore

      of October, the engine cooling,

      the fan blades so lazily turning, but turning.

      Daddy Longlegs

      Here, on fine long legs springy as steel,

      a life rides, sealed in a small brown pill

      that skims along over the basement floor

      wrapped up in a simple obsession.

      Eight legs reach out like the master ribs

      of a web in which some thought is caught

      dead center in its own small world,

      a thought so far from the touch of things

      that we can only guess at it. If mine,

      it would be the secret dream

      of walking alone across the floor of my life

      with an easy grace, and with love enough

      to

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