| American
Life in Poetry: Column 091
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
How many of us, when passing through some small town, have felt that it
seemed familiar though we’ve never been there before. And of course
it seems familiar because much of the course of life is pretty much the
same wherever we go, right down to the up-and-down fortunes of the football
team and the unanswered love letters.
Here’s a poem by Mark
Vinz:
Driving Through
This could be the town you’re from,
marked only by what it’s near.
The gas station man speaks of weather
and the high school football team
just as you knew he would—
kind to strangers, happy to live here.
Tell yourself it doesn’t matter now,
you’re only driving through.
Past the sagging, empty porches
locked up tight to travelers’ stares,
toward the great dark of the fields,
your headlights startle a flock of
old love letters—still undelivered,
enroute for years.
Reprinted from “Red River Blues,” published
by College of the Mainland, Texas City, TX, 1977, by permission of the
author. Copyright © 1977 by Mark Vinz, whose most recent book is
“Long Distance,” Midwestern Writers Publishing House, 2005.
This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library
of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska,
Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.
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On Ice
Copyright 2006 By Steve Deasy
I opened the cooler to get me a
cold one
But the last bottle was gone
I looked at the ice and I froze in my tracks
Wondering what’s going on
Nothing had melted, no water to be seen,
What in the world could that possibly mean?
This cooler must me made out of some
super insulating polystyrene
I shook my head once or twice
And put 12 more bottles on ice
Then I got to thinking I’m just
like that caveman,
Trapped in the ice, frozen inside,
I reach out to no one, nobody gets near me
Turns out that ice is a good place to hide
I’m just like the guy in that Nowhere
Man song,
I want to fit in but I just don’t belong
I think that I’m right and so everyone else must be wrong
A prisoner of my own device
My life is on ice
Open me up, let the warmth in,
Melt my ice fortress away
Bring me back to the living
Live for today
Sit down beside me, let’s share
this moment
Pull me back in if I start to freeze out
While you’re here with me let me be fully present
I think that’s what this is all about
I’m through with pretending I’m
somebody else
Dump out the ice, put the beer back on the shelf
Drop all the things that can stop me from showing you my true self
It brings pain, but it also adds spice
When you’re life is no longer on ice
Lamb’s song assignment to Steve
Deasy:
Steve, let’s say you’ve got a twelve-pack of beer on ice.
You have waited a long time for the beer to get properly cold. You go
to the cooler, pull out one cold beer and you open it. You drink that
first one. Then you drink a second cold one. Then you drink ten more
in succession. The cooler is empty of beer but not of ice. The ice in
the cooler is intact. There is no water in the bottom of the cooler.
The amount of ice cubes you put in the cooler with the beer in it is
the same amount you have with the beer out of it. There has been no
meltdown. Is it possible that you own a very well insulated cooler?
The underlying theme for the 2006 Lamb’s
Retreat song assignments is Sublimation. To read more lyrics and their
assignments go to the Sublimation Station page at http://www.springfed.org/Sublimation_Station.html.
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