Day 138 | Not Here by Jane Kenyon

Day 139 | Not Here by Jane Kenyon

Day 42 | Old Men Watching Baseball by Oliver Evans

Old Men Watching Baseball
Oliver Evans

Huddled together for comfort on warm park benches
They sit in the inappropriate noonday sun
With sagging souls and bellies, wearily watching
The baseball boys in bright and agile bronze,
Uneasy knowledge in them of a time
When they, like these, could hit and fitly run
For beckoning bases. Playing then was prime
Before the fast and curving years descended
Upon them one by one, and struck them out.

O baseball boys, see here your final score!
For we grew faces in our flowery years
Soft-smooth as yours, our limbs were likewise limber,
Our throats as statuesque, our muscles moved
As mightily, our waists were just as slender.
Our voices carried, and we played as long
As sunlight lasted, heedless of the fears
Of old men whispering on twilight benches.

Day 37 | Totem by Eamon Grennan

Day 42 | Totem by Eamon Grennan

Day 26 | So This Is Nebraska by Ted Kooser

Day 91 | So This Is Nebraska by Ted Kooser

Day 139 | Not Here by Jane Kenyon

Not Here
Jane Kenyon

Searching for pillowcases trimmed

with lace that my mother-in-law

once made, I open the chest of drawers

upstairs to find that mice

have chewed the blue and white linen

dishtowels to make their nest,

and bedded themselves

among embroidered dresser scarves

and fingertip towels.

 

Tufts of fibers, droppings like black

caraway seeds, and the stains of birth

and afterbirth give off the strong

unforgettable attar of mouse

that permeates an old farmhouse

on humid summer days.

 

A couple of hickory nuts

roll around as I lift out

the linens, while a hail of black

sunflower shells

falls on the pillowcases,

yellow with age, but intact.

I’ll bleach them and hang them in the sun

to dry. There’s almost no one left

who knows how to crochet lace….

 

The bright-eyed squatters are not here.

They’ve scuttled out to the fields

for summer, as they scuttled in

for winter—along the wall, from chair

to skirted chair, making themselves

flat and scarce while the cat

dozed with her paws in the air,

and we read the mail

or evening paper, unaware.

Day 26 | Ashore by Ernest Hilbert

Ashore
Ernest Hilbert

The harpooned great white shark heaves onto sand,
Nudged by waves, red cavern of dripping teeth.
A crowd comes. Loud gulls wreathe the booming mist.
Blue flies cloud the fishy sunset, and land.
One, sated, is slapped to a smear beneath
A child’s quick hand and then flicked from his wrist.
Compass and munitions are sunk with skulls
In wrecks beneath old storms, glass angels
And hourglasses, flint of sunlight through motes,
Violence of slit sails, drowned crews, split hulls,
Quiet draw of dust, too, and all that it pulls,
The slow leak and loss of each thing that floats—
Flail and wild eye, flecked spit of crippled horse,
Crust of diamonds on the throat of a corpse.

Day 16 | So This Is Nebraska by Ted Kooser

Day 91 | So This Is Nebraska by Ted Kooser.

Day 91 | So This Is Nebraska by Ted Kooser

So This Is Nebraska
Ted Kooser

The gravel road rides with a slow gallop

over the fields, the telephone lines

streaming behind, its billow of dust

full of the sparks of redwing blackbirds.

On either side, those dear old ladies,

the loosening barns, their little windows

dulled by cataracts of hay and cobwebs

hide broken tractors under their skirts.

So this is Nebraska. A Sunday

afternoon; July. Driving along

with your hand out squeezing the air,

a meadowlark waiting on every post.

Behind a shelterbelt of cedars,

top-deep in hollyhocks, pollen and bees,

a pickup kicks its fenders off

and settles back to read the clouds.

You feel like that; you feel like letting

your tires go flat, like letting the mice

build a nest in your muffler, like being

no more than a truck in the weeds,

clucking with chickens or sticky with honey

or holding a skinny old man in your lap

while he watches the road, waiting

for someone to wave to. You feel like

waving. You feel like stopping the car

and dancing around on the road. You wave

instead and leave your hand out gliding

larklike over the wheat, over the houses.

Day 42 | Totem by Eamon Grennan

Totem
Eamon Grennan

All Souls’ over, the roast seeds eaten, I set

on a backporch post our sculpted pumpkin

under the weather, warm still for November.

Night and day it gapes in at us

through the kitchen window, going soft

in the head. Sleepwalker-slow, a black rash of ants

harrows this hollow globe, munching

the pale peach flesh, sucking its seasoned

last juices dry. In a week, when the ants and

humming flies are done, only a hard remorseless light

drills and tenants it through and through. Within,

it turns mould-black in patches, stays

days like this while the weather takes it

in its shifty arms: wide eye-spaces shine,

the disapproving mouth holds firm. Another week,

a sad leap forward: sunk to one side

so an eye-socket’s almost blocked, it becomes

a monster of its former self. Human, it would have

rotted beyond unhappiness and horror

to some unspeakable subject state—its nose

no more than a vertical hole, the thin

bridge of amber between nose and mouth

in ruins. The other socket opens

wider than ever: disbelief.

                                        It’s all downhill

from here: knuckles of sun, peremptory

steady fingers of frost, strain all day and night—

cracking the rind, kneading the knotted fibres

free. The crown, with its top-knot mockery

of stalk, caves in; the skull buckles; the whole

sad head drips tallowy tears: the end

is in sight. In a day or two it topples on itself

like ruined thatch, pus-white drool spidering

from the corner of the mouth, worming its way

down the body-post. All dignity to the winds,

it bows its bogeyman face of dread

to the inevitable.

                           And now, November almost out,

it is in the bright unseasonable sunshine

a simmer of pulp, a slow bake, amber shell speckled

chalk-grey with lichen. Light strikes and strikes

its burst surfaces: it sags, stays at the end of

its brief tether—a helmet of dark circles, death caul.

Here is the last umbilical gasp, everybody’s

nightmare parent, the pitiless system

rubbing our noses in it. But pity poor lantern-head

with his lights out, glob by greasy glob

going back where he came from: as each seed-shaped

drop falls free, it catches and clutches

for one split second the light. When the pumpkin

lapses to our common ground at last—where

a swaddle of snow will fold it in no time

from sight—I try to take in the empty space it’s left

on top of the wooden post: it is that empty space.

Day 26 | Bolt by Philip Booth

Bolt
Philip Booth

It’s shot all right: this bolt about
as long as a small boy’s forearm, thick
as a man’s first finger—except
for its square iron head and square nut,
the female threads frozen by rust
to the bolt itself: gorged and ridged
like a mined-out range of hills,
maybe on some peninsula
far to the North. A cold salt fog
has finally settled its dust. Its pits
are dark as marrow, the oxidized ridges
lifted gold: like ferrous tailings
the sun only recently left. God
only knows what it once held together,
what weathered away or broke up
around it: buckboard or keelson,
furnace or plow; the atmosphere
transported and fired them. Feral, now,
too crude to be more than a primitive
weapon, it’s simply itself: a bolt
cast up by tides that can’t float it;
with nothing else left, a man kneels
over it carefully, here on a shore
where the stones themselves are adrift.