An hour with Kevin Rabas

what do you get when you mix of contemporary verse i'm j mcintyre and today on keeping our present that as poetry and we celebrate national poetry month with jazz poet henry will also hear the poetry of former national poet laureate ted kooser reported last year and in the first week jas poetry is a literary genres influenced as expected by the form and rhythm and sound of jazz and it began in the early twentieth century with the birth of jazz and blues running through the harlem renaissance and the beat movement and continues today jazz poet kevin greatest teaches literature and creative writing at emporia state university and he's also an accomplished jazz drummer and he reads from his book the first born and other poems accompanied by jorge balance your books when i offered books she pulls back the

pages until the spines crack exposing where the pages turn around son had yellowed backed wyatt and she poked her nose into that place where the book is did it takes in a long breath and i remember my books are objects not ideal as words but had stuffed blackening energy is books on loan to my stray markings and paper scrap paid holders as well as all the sense of all the rooms i had lived in books with me in apartments in the city and suburbs on trains moving community in the mountains he says will side by side running tracks and libraries and bookstores and after encounters when the hands through the water on park benches on car has been atop a lot of washers and these votes statewide scene everyone and everything left off for a while the books were maimed and i lend them knowing they too may leave one day and fire water forgetfulness taking all of my stand

with them scaling to the top shelf of the used bookstore moving on into the silken bander and perfumes and wills and varnishes of someone else's short and recorded last lovely obscurity solitary life this next one is called magic and there it's you know not all poetry is serious and this one has caught of the kicker at the end magic there is nothing more natural in the world for the hand to hold an egg a magician knows this and he hides one with every other motion he knows how to pull an egg from your ear or slowly as a snake from out of his own mouth it does add a cup two quarters in the palm of one hand only patients keep spawned koreans from clinking together and they're shuffled cards magic as when he discovers that hadn't changed while doing his laundry the title of the book these are coming from is called birds horn

and it's after byrd charlie bird parker and then the story goes at least the legend goes that charlie parker got his name as they were touring driving through the country they had a chicken or yard bird and the other guys in the band said what should we do with it and charlie parker said let's eat it and so after that he was called bird there other reasons he was called bird has come a law declined to be brought there used to be in the background he brought those to the foreground that ornamentation and made it the main part of the two anyway this one is called birds warm and it's in the voice of a fellow bop saxophonist as that dramatic monologue that i took from an interview with the jazz saxophonist of charlie parker's era and i can do instead and turned him is paul masso tweet syllabus was no longer really that person's bomb but it comes from the voice of a fellow bop saxophonist school birds warm nights i lit him einhorn afternoons i wrapped my hands around the hole one bird blue this was not unusual bird was often

without a horn a border town and everyone would offer him on he'd play anything but a plastic saxophone especially made just about the level of a toy in toronto i'm told they kept it put it in a museum piece of plastic blade wants full of only hispanic i don't wear a damn thing from him said to keep my hands on my horn get my hands on my worn keep my hands on my corns whatever war the pen

thank you that's right ana doing on here called at jam it has a couple of things i should say before it won as it mentions at the end of drummers around which isn't related things sometimes it's a both because of big person has been around and the drivers back

are the other things are in the same i wanna know is play out is to blame or play more vigorously are busier or louder lot more to something in the tune and layout which means stop playing so this one's called epogen and savage are teens and ninety ninety six thirteen zip club that sell black about a block north of the intersection of forty seven and maine which is odd as a wednesday as there is the edge of the plaza in kansas city at the jam thirteenth nineteen ninety six the tune as freddie hubbard little sunflower with its double time latin section which everything gets loud and vast i can barely keep up and as we lean into this blazing tempo the bassist playing on the tips of his fingers now bunkering into the brown body of his base i start to lose count the quarter notes scattering like pigeons up from the sidewalk and into the vile the sunset sky clouds swirling into dad's a watercolor

paints play out i think i hear the bass man say i raise my steak knives the tips of the sticks almost to my channel my hands pumping as if there is water to be bad deep within these dramas i listen again and he's repeating his voice louder now lots of lots and allow the russian of the rhythm section a stampede pass me leaving the silence and motionless in the darkness see another drummer is crooked letter from rome and then i read another jazz poem i was a jazz musician in kansas city i still play but not really am making anything with it i'm at the time that i did these bonds are set was almost pay my rent is jazz musician in kansas city amahl sort of a librarian for the school paper and out so summarize come from that experience this one is kind of a mentor in porn from our frank was one of chet baker's drummers anybody heard chet baker before a few of us yeah the

great trumpeter and singer that was pushed or jump out of a window and that's all you need is life around eighty seven or so physical documentary of his later years called let's get lost you can check out any way omar was this guy's drummer and art comes in the kansas city any doesn't york and does verizon only comes through it tries to teach as many people as he can and he was teaching me some things about playing and i wrote robert them down and compress them into his palm and have a couple of terms in him one as the speed bag which is be seen rocky it's apple thing that they needed to get a judgment of it on the little bag that's attached to ceiling and also there's triplets in the us which are three beats to arm a quarter no beat so it's a triple a triple a triple a triple it and the other is for isn't a sitcom for is or where they give the drummer a little bit of a solo so the pianist my place four bars of music a little bit of music and then the drummer play for bars in those saxophones will play for the drummer play for the bases will play for the german play for

essentially there alternate back and forth a given the drummer a little bit of time to solo so this one's called art frank speed bag i used to get the speed bag and play triplets thats how i got my quick style boxing and drumming sunday's became the same thing i felt the younger guys like come up to play don't say all in one around remembering that center around and also a low until the end to make a big benefit for many guys play for the navy's even in the first song wasted energy save that for the end to make a bid for the end of it it's so great to have drama company on these things especially gallon as perfect for the speed bag this next one is another drama experience born and dies when i started coming back to play after a little hiatus as other stuff into the cold night shirts that shimmer to dinner

and when the annulment papers came in the mail know we're from nine years i knew she must've livin livin lived on the blocks i once wondered and walked a new dance with the made in the clubs or danced while they played in the background floated dollar bills across bars to other friends ed talks with musicians her and her large large father who had enough cash for all a bellman said yeah yeah that's and jazz that some real jazz we heard tonight and i turned and left the restaurant once during my new wives office party left the club noticing him in the back row waiting talking with the women who were night shirts that shimmer to dinner the club right stop by to say hey sit in and catch up on my old life now their lives in the back rows waiting watching listening never knowing why we played for their pay when the berry lit hours and the hours of darkness only neon can light it lived ours know i can repeat

and parts of town and rundown corner is where music moves in the building as blood moves in the body and women can dance however the damn well please an american standup or no any damn thing as spare can muster you know the chord changes with his heart to know the bar top and the saxophone bass and the drum head and the simple dish and the touch of brushes when they're new cat paw on spanish tile quick delicate as a tear drops the sensitive get on the hard thing or the ring finger man and here's another damned drumming and music on this one draws a bomb on then the knowledge and beyond their experience of learning to play brushes so this one's called and calvin roses store and calvin rosie store he loved the sound of brushes he kept cardboard near the drum

section and stools low to the floor when they had circles on the cardboard left hand and right hand spinning in opposite direction stir that suu kyi would say steer that soup and we would tap out time the brush lifting from the cardboard and returning with a whip sound others would practice the press the flan in the whisper rough all we needed was some cardboard which he supplied and our brushes the wire strands of that nothing caught on the edge of that as of the cardboard why are slam gray and uniform grading a fan shaped a whisk to stir and slap against cardboard shows how the grocery store cash pip pip pip

pip pip pip to paint to paint to paint it to protect the pope to pay

to play and detained and protect them

and that they can depend on the bed and then in the end of time and that time and this next one is called perfect people to someone about teaching drum lessons a onetime was teaching so much

drawn lessons and do as a rehearsal the one that attacked crash data somebody spouse to they couldn't do anymore and this one is kind of about that perfect people while stand sleeps tracy turns on the tube and puts her three daughters down for the night stands asleep upstairs stand learns jim day afternoon's true of video sometimes i come over and teach stand how to listen for his heartbeat and make that blood beets push through his hands or goat skin calling grant up into the drown while stand sleeves tracy watches the two blades all stand dreams of golden cross is tracy watches the body's tumbling on the tv the women moving and sees a colored sand she keeps the tv muted was stan and tracy rast i camp an orange money back in their living room my energy spent and stands less in

both hands a blood red austan sleeves tracy rises in the violet midnight live and baser asthmatic daughter i cannot sleep tonight i rise early take a glass of apple juice from the fridge stance hands or soft it passes me the glass and i move from the house script nicer my tan sedans windshield with my drivers license my backseat loaded with gifts dreaming of children one day and i move on driving on the black guy's alive for thirty five it's getting toward the guard rail and returning on a gas tank full of fumes i pull into my own home his now wife and sleep i sleep for days it seems and another drum pullman in order to move into some poems that are not so much about music this one is dedicated to a drummer todd straight talk a lot of people drones in kansas city it was kind of the drum intellectual and it

had hung techniques for playing along with how to play was stolen this one this poem is about technique making the sound of circled quarter marks for todd straight there is this spot a few inches in from the symbols ram words sound is clearest and driest and take a quarter and draw a circle around it this as well will hit within this target and over and over i will play it until the circle is full of tall dark marks more the beat of the drumstick it's against the metal of the cymbals ring was making this sound is circled quarter marks a sound i found one afternoon after playing so many spots around the symbol so many spots until i found just wanted this one to mark and repeat play again since we are in wards of god or read a poem or two at least

but are about lawrence on when the iraq war started there are there are tips that sprung up and south park i'm in protest on asking for peace and yet one of my friends said that sounds like too much fun the glam camp out for a while and so we decided to meditate in front of city hall as are small protest and that all although there are artistic liberties taken and was born pretty much does what happened in yoga pose for the firing range today beside the cup station at five in the morning when that stan arrived early and we awaken our yogi by tossing small stones against her window it is not easy to awaken in this town are not easy when the park is filled with tents war zaun and some see a way to get some press can't towards peace or the rest are silent we went for it instead of meditated yards from city hall and police headquarters that's the way and i had seen them the police cops on the

sidewalk days earlier or yogis last day out and about town on the sidewalk with her lover him popping off giving the butch blonde cop lit quoting a statuette and us missing a night in jail by silences by seconds by footsteps by leaves collecting and floating dead and dry in the streets and before the daffodils kamen we missed it by inches and stan consoled her and we lived it again cross legged yards from authority from the hands with badges yards feet from time in a cell and i missed it again and i stretch limbering humbling my body my hands caught in that pistol gesture the tibetans master arms straight up and that's fingers pointed into the clouds that gesture i caught up maybe four gun came to america york a practice to straighten the spine hands aimed at the son wyatt son seventh day of spring always flaring before we were done something a little bit lighter says we are at about the one for the point of the semester i

thought i would read a poem on dedicated to teachers and students everywhere was once called an exam an exam i watch for that fire the i am it can linger when a student looks up and knows pencils perpendicular to the paper or at a slant pencils raised and the thought at work than waking through the wooden into the lead the answers are somewhere above us rising somewhere near the surfaces of the faces of the honeycomb fluorescent lights were traveling through the winding to tunnels of the brain are arriving now in a sentence a flash now jotted on college ruled paper or something i'll read later as the crows glide by out the window diving sometimes landing in congregate in baking as something struggling in the road now it's not that the grading is exactly like baking and something in the road but sometimes it's something like that see here i'm going to read

one that came from a writing exercise within and in class was a repetition exercise unedited along with mike my students and it seemed to work out for me is like terminus born the other preface on this is i was watching that somewhat cheesy cinderella movie ever after and this one came out of that experience once she always found it easy to love and he found it hard to find love although there were few he did not love she gave everything at once and he gave nothing until you knew he could have everything at once until i knew he would not lose everything at once it's really knew she might get everything or nothing at once he knew nothing and she knew everything only she didn't let on and he learned everything at once and she allowed nothing in given a place alongside everything until she had even more than that in him to boot and he found her gave everything last nothing at once

this one is called the fall dong one i had this big mirror between us have been hit into the back of his blue pickup truck goggles part retarded a giant and blue jeans and grain crops or in a white t shirt with battery acid on it his glasses are thicker than my own so i grab hold of this monster mirror and a glance and we both look into that me or noticing the clarity of the blue sky and those green oh please reflected so perfectly that appears you could just dive on into that mirror and sink into the sky and we think the same thing you could fall up goggles says and just keep on falling nothing would stop you and that was a way of its goggles mind was now my mind and i was in that mirror falling on up through those white smoke clouds headed toward an orange sun dublin i stacked box bed springs on top the mirror and some branches from out front and i could hear that large mirror crack but they've gone on i could still see

it that vision of sinking into the sky drowning with only the sun to hold us up noreen a few more and new poems as well some called you'll need them all one day we'll need them all one day her things and to grab into brown grocery bags elisa but the ride fifty first free coffee shop and i met her she said i'm sleeping in the park tonight and i said no come with me and she said where is we got a room at the west for holiday inn and i made love for the first time she said they label me hysterical took the light bulbs at night so i wouldn't cut myself i thought the night might never and don't we all secretly wish id but the son might not come around again what was alive she said i said like being in space you're lying she said this isn't your first time and we showered together she drew sides on my chest just me and said with each kiss and new hair will grow you'll need them all one

day and redone own kind of divorce poem called been credit cards i had our last credit card in my hands and i'd been to until it came apart i gave you happy he said let's forget about all this and go out dancing tonight we were deciding to divorce this would be the last time we spoke out of court afterwards the art that you made our photos and the art that our friends had given us would all go we would not talk between us a silence would settle i would see you and traffic near the holidays and then that cold you hon your head out the side window of a friend's hunter green suv and said merry christmas carol in an apple though were to cry there was that buoyancy enjoy still in your voice during that last time that i saw you when i was returning for my new loves apartment her case is still wet upon my

lips thank you the pen

tell us to write paper letters it's almost a lost art one point i was singing about fifty letters a day and a friend said to lisa my wife should take a stance away and so here is one of those poems about writing letters and as a cameo of the dusty bookshelf

but its name out slow words the mailbox is now empty your letter has not arrived i check my you know about ten times a day there is a problem with how fast we can learn the news of each other's lives and i would rather take the slow train instead of the fast plane overhead i order to books over the internet and forty five seconds when i could have chopped all day at the used bookstore and the next big or tan and read so long and come away with nothing in my hands walking over the wooden threshold and out into the hundred degree sun all week the sun is slated to bakers meteorologists all agree it won't let up until the weekend rain comes when i will most or when i will most likely open the black metal lid of her porch mailbox and find inside your reply and for me it may mean a day spent inside listening for the pulse of your words on the page watching your blue pen loops for signs of your voice your mouth your words

when my son was about two i buy stuff i wrote this bomber started this bomb and i try to write one little thing he says every day since that day i usually only get three or four a week but i try to write out something like women to the affair we got back he said you know the roller coaster should i go so high it might put out the sun sets as little things like that and this one has them saying oh something too so was it called the train comes their town evenings will end with this one the train comes the town evenings the train comes the town evenings and beaches a window facing the tracks you can economists are there and watch the train go past i start her son almost two watches and says chu chu watching the lights in the wheels running the metal on metal and the sound of the

train moving and the track arms lowering and blinking red his hand stop in the orange rice his fingers pinching at what he has his face turning to the window until everything in the restaurant seems to stop and watch the train the metal harbinger of another age lumber is on and you've been listening to jazz poet kevin raye this reading from his collection birds board and other poems he was accompanied on the drug supply for hate alastair this was recorded september twenty fifteen thousand eight at the kansas union at the university of kansas and we continue our celebration of national poetry month with a reading by ted kooser cruiser served as poet laureate of the united states from two thousand four two two thousand six his book delights and shadows won the pulitzer prize for poetry in two thousand five this reading was recorded at washburn university

in topeka shortly after age fifty emporia and i went on the road and all the sudden there was a lot of attention to me and so i had been a rather quiet and retiring person up to that point and my friends would sometimes come to me and put their hand on my shoulder and they'd say how you doing with this who are your how you hold them and do the dogs miss you when you're gone and how scanty do initially doing ok and the things i wrote this little poem in to answer about what my life had become much more success i can feel the thick yellow fat of applause building up in my arteries friends yet i go on a fool for adoration to like hear that when it sloughs off that is likely to go straight to the brain i'm already showing the first signs of political phase you are the words coming hard the senate's use of metaphor no longer connecting but look at me down on my knees next to the podium

lapping the last drops that rolling in the strain like a dog getting the smell in my good tweet sport coat the grease on my suede elbow patches and phil what well for the women i walked past the next morning the ones in the terminal wheeling their luggage looking so beautifully honest all for the hope that they will suddenly dilate their nostrils squeeze the hard carry on handles and rise to the ripening odor of praise with which i have based at myself stinking to heaven some of you know that i worked for many years at a desk and a life insurance company i was tossed out of graduate school because i was a lousy rasor student and i had to find work and i want to work in an entry level job at a life insurance company in

over thirty five years somehow or other became a vice president of a life insurance company having never had a business course or knowing not even knowing what insurance was when i went into the business i just looking for a job but i wrote some poems during those years that i looking back at him the other day as sort of indicative of what my how my life has changed over the years at first in nineteen sixty four and perch behind a desk i'm i'm wanting to be a poet and i sent more than anything else i find myself in an informative he recalls an identical risks and saw him and i was i was sort of angry and frustrated well then in the soap home which i think i can find here came out of that time period they had torn off my face at the office they had torn off my face at the office the night that i finally noticed that was not

growing back i decided to slit my wrist is nothing ran out i was empty both of my hands selloff shortly thereafter now at my job they only the type with the stamps it pleases and to have helped me and i gained speed and confidence survey where was back then and then as the years passed i began like much like many of us do and i i hated so young people in this room that the sweetest who will happen to them that they will get mellow with age but it will happen i began to get better and in that environment theres a apple up on that i wrote one morning my office at this time was on the top floor of a building in downtown lincoln the overlooked or a bank on the corner at the office early rain has beaten the pains of my

office window and at each little lambs the bank at the corner hangs upside down what wonderful music this rain must have made in the night a thousand banks turned over the change crashing out of the drawers and rounding up stairs to the roof the soft percussion of firms dropping out of their pots the ballpoint pens popping out of their sockets and a fluffy snow of deposits slips now all day long as the sun dries the clans i'll hear the soft piano of banks writing themselves the underpaid sellers cutting their nickels and dimes so i began to sit in there and then toward the end of my insurance career i retired in the spring of nineteen ninety and i had really come to understand something that has been a very important truth to me that nearly everyone in the world is trying to devote live a good life and that the the meanest among us the meanest and smallest

in and out most disenfranchised of us are all trying to live a good life i i once spoke to on a man who was at work in a county jail in texas and this is the gao that process is all the man they're on their way to be executed at huntsville as you know i would assume you know in texas execute a hundred and fifty people you and i said to this man i met him at a wedding a symbol of all those men who use men and women you've seen on the way to death row how many of them do think a really genuinely evil people they said no more than one or two out of a hundred and said the rest of them had just made very bad choices and the marvelous lesson to me i really am devoted to the ordinary world i was telling a class yesterday that i was for a little poem that said if you can awaken inside the familiar and discovered new indeed never leave home

in your some little poems about the kind of things around us all the time the leaky faucet all through the night the leaky faucet searches the still most of the house with its radar blip who is awake who lives around for years for years and in the sink cheer up cheer up a little faucet calls someone will help you through your life a spiral notebook right now in topeka in drugstores places that sell school supplies i would i suppose there are a hundred thousand spiral notebooks the bright warner roles like a porpoise in and out of the calm blue sea of the cover or perhaps like a sleeper twisting in and out of his dreams for could hold a record of dreams if you wanted to buy it for that though it seems to be known for more

serious work with its columns ruled of lines and discovered that state's an emphatic white letters five subject noble it seems a part of growing old is no longer have fights six weeks demanding an equal share of attention set apart by brown cardboard the riders but instead the stand in a drugstore and hang on to one subject a little too long like this notebook you weigh in your hands passing your fingers overt surfaces as if it were some kind of wonder i was held on my knees a simple wooden box in which a rainbow only a dusty unbroken it was a set of pastels and eight years before belonged to the painter mary croissant and all the colors she had used in a work lay open before me those use she'd most use the peaches and pinks well worn down to stubs well the cool colors violent alter marine had been set scarcely touch to one

side she had little patience with darkness and are hard held only a major shadow i touch the warm dust of those colors are tools and left there with lights on the tips of my fingers and if you were first article readers can just go home how many of you here are familiar with the landscape paintings of keith jacob say you know the name of all keith was raising wichita his father who just died was a test pilot in wichita and keith keith is one of the best landscape painters on the great plains says his paintings are very successful along the i mean he's been very successful in with his paintings in an he's a lovely guy and a very distant cousin of mine an end when i'm emily guerin we have the time during the school year and song we our families get together for dinner

once on one night he told me this story and the old man who appears in his home his keys on great grandfather and the young woman's body is coming back would have been his grandmother's sister the bearded person dressed in his church and under the shadow of his hand the old man stood on the wooden people platform three feet above the rest of kansas all the westbound fraiche of interest to a stop he had the agent into man commercial travelers waiting to go on west paul mailbags out of the steam then slid out his daughter's coffin canvas over wood and set it on a nearby baggage cart not till the train and rolled away and treated once surpassed the shacks on the leading edge in the distance and not till the agent had disappeared dragging the bags of male behind it the old man pry up the nail down live with a

bar he brought in the wagon adam and it took all he hadn't seen her in a dozen years at nineteen without his blessing she go on back east to be an actors' now and then writing her mother and a cure free ne'er do well cursive to say she was happy living in style a week before the agent sent word that there was a telegram reading and the old man and his wife rode to town to read that their daughter had died and her remains were on the way home remains that's how they put it she was wearing a fancy yellow dress was no longer young and pretty she looked like one of the war around all she'd left in a room at the farm where he would sometimes go to see it a bag of women's private under things and stuff between her feet and someone had pushed down next to her and evening they pleaded with girls you opened the purse and found it empty

so we took a few bills out of his pocket and for the man and snapped it close for her mother to find then with the back of the bar kept the lid and placing went to find a station agent the two of them listed the coffin down and carried it a few current yards across the sunny dusty floor of kansas and loaded onto the creaking oregon than clapping is haram is here and slapping the plough world of his mirror with the reigns he started the long haul home with his rich and famous dumb ass opponent i've said you know i could take a little credit ideas for writing and family told me you know from someone else but it's very much like a willa cather novel shrunken size room has all those elements is a poem about the workings of

memory a memory get into some memory poems memory spinning up dust and corn shucks is across the choppy exhausted feels it sucked up into it's hard hard work cold work lunch buckets good horses they had horses their names and the names are mules that were better or worse than the horses they unraveled the day the same size of the first machine shook the manure spreader crank the tractors crank that broke the uncle's arm then swept onto the wind break taking a tree house and dirty magazines turning its fury on the bar workhouse kicked over buckets and the great can set for a squirt of thick milk and his whiskers crusted chicken and undid the hook what the warm brown made from the meanest hand and turned toward the house worth pressures were having dinner peel back the roof in the kitchen ceiling reach down and snatched up uncles and cousins grandma grandpa all parents and children one by one goal the white

dolls looked long am longingly into their faces then set them back in their cheers with blue and white platters of chicken and ham and mashed potatoes still steaming before them with bolts of gravy and bowls appease and three kinds of pie and suddenly with a sound like a song i drew up the crowded rolling dusty funnel and bearded stick was the neighborhood in the way memory works for recreation sweep of everything you can and then it's both canada to get back in my family a little bit those of you like antiques know the feeling of holding something old i'm living in jordan take you back and this is a right wing a strong record take hold of this

old five the alan clarke stamped with this little red wings and look your thumbs over its lip and let it fly you back over the years to the gray green backwater value of pickles the sugary kitchens with galvanized buckets of cucumbers smelling like freshly brushed here a place of rig hands of oil cost of mason jars bubbling and cameras and mammal like midnight and spattered with stars of linoleum floors were big women move on their pastors like an upright pianos rumbling along with their bifocals steam keeping the stove stoked the coffee pot on their gossip rolling at a steady boyle as the package or school and leads glackin upon a vacuum and the morning here is wild with flags of vinegar not all of those and all those allies are idyllic as we know has a freezer full of on a great aunt and great uncle mine taken

when they were about sixty years old i had been looking for trouble photographs and i found this picture and they're sitting together for the former but there's a lot of distance between them the sole couple nielsen libya were married for seventy years here they are sixty years old and already like brother and sister small westerner size larger years the same series line to the mounts after those years spent together sharing the weather of sex the sour milk of lost children barnes burning grasshoppers fevers and silence they were beginning to share their hard looks how far apart they've seen it not touching and shoulder warn the hands clasped in their laps as if under each pair was a key to a truck hidden somewhere for those lessons one keeps to himself they probably risen at daybreak and dress code the stall will be wearing black wall with a car ablaze mills is worn

suit they had driven to town in the wagon inclined of the studio only to make this term statement noting like a leaf that though they looked just alike they were separate people with separate wishes already gone stale a good to feed a space between thirty years ago i am i was much taken with the when the older women when i was a little boy my great aunts and enhance and so on who have all the skills of making pickles and song i'm a little poem of tribute to those women a jar of buttons this is a core sample from the floor of the sea of mending a cylinder packed with shells that over many years saying through fathoms of shirts call buttons blue buttons and settled together beneath the waves of perseverance

and ocean upon which generations of women set forth and the sales of gangnam curtains and seated side by side on decks sometimes salt of my tears made small but important repairs i've made a sort of a project as i got older of writing poems about my family my members of my family we're very very ordinary people and would otherwise be completely forgettable but what i've tried to do is write about him in such a way that when someone reads about them finds a poem of mine we come into life and this is an example of that kind what happened was that i had learned at that one of my mother's last first cousins was not really much longer he was a nursing home and in gothenburg aisle and so i called appearances the anonymous owner driver and see him and songs of a big i'm

all dressed up and having a wheelchair out in the visiting room in and so on he had it over the last years of his life developed a very pronounced very black a spot on his hand went up in the sleeve of his new pleasure which figures into his home and what i've done in this poem toward the end as i actually plug his name right and this poem as if it were a plaque a good by handshake though you and the nursing home or miles behind me now your hand with his dark blue age spots is here in mind and your fingers warm from all the hot steel handle they help when you're eighty eight years levers of russian machines of circle bar morrison bayer's the cooling now slowly going all blue black or brown like a pool of blue all along the floor of the barn that darkness working its way out into the cuffs of your new plan to shoot

a pasture elbow sharp as a plowshare there in the wheelchair armrest easing over your heart like a shadow a hundred miles down the road start but the highway and sitting in shape at the edge of a shimmering cornfield i say goodbye i am headed more farther and further the new iraq friedman with love i take your blue black hand which is held a nearly everything once and he squeezed it shyly and politely there's my dear grandmother mosher throwing the dish water off the backstairs somebody told me recently that there are probably lots of people who've never seen anyone so do short baxter down the drain it goes this water slap of the screen or flat knock of my grandmother's boxy black shoes on a wooden stool the harsh and sweep over not need cotton paper and stride out of the edge and then told in with a furious twist and heave a

bridge that leads from or hot red hands and hangs there shining for fifty years over the mystified chickens over the swaying nettles the rate we likely slow down the creek over the red winged blackbirds in the tops of the willows a glorious rainbow with an empty dish can hang it will mean aunt mildred after she cooked and then even the meat she watched in rents the butcher paper under a pitcher point that drew a red water up from assistant under the house rain speckled with dirt from the cedar shingles then put the paper out on the line to drive using all closed and swain by law i the paper and an actual rounder things witchy dry inside her pillow cases so they couldn't be seen from the street then press the paper with a hot set ireland carefully cut into little squares picked up a pencil stub and pinched

hard strangers and wrote a small but generous letter to the world you've been listening to former poet laureate ted kooser reading his work out washburn university's memorial union in february two thousand seven the recording engineer was chubby smith before that jas poet kevin raiders accompanied by drummer for a balanced or i'm j mcintyre i have even joined the celebration of national poetry month for more information about national poetry month in poetry in general is that you don't view that the way that war and that you believe that he died it's a collection of radio at the university of kansas ted

cruz it's bad ah

issue for them and you