Untitled Document
note: this is the anniversary of the death at fifty-five of my dearest friend
who was
the first woman dean of a u.s.
medical school: she wrote this in
a
letter to me when she was eighteen.
sciencepoem #2
last night
cleo our cat gave birth to
three kittens in my dresser drawer
on a
beautiful red sweater one was
stillborn so we took it to the
kitchen
now that I’m almost a med student I
gave my little
sisters an anatomy lesson
underneath the kitty’s skin huge
clots
of bluish blood slid about giving her
an eerie ethereal
appearance her ribs
were paper thin and all her viscera
had a bloody
pink look cookie wanted
to see the brains so I chopped the
head in
two with a scissors and using
my eyebrow tweezers was going to
show
the salient features but the tissue
flowed out smoothly like
stirred up
gelatin custard poor little kitty we
buried her gently in
the back yard
© Jacqueline
Jackson 2007
Here the Maine poet, Wesley McNair, offers us a vivid
description of a man who has lived beyond himself. I’d guess you
won’t easily forget this sad old man in his apron with his tray of
cheese.
The One I Think of Now
At the end of my stepfather’s life when his anger was gone, and the saplings of his failed nursery had grown into trees, my newly feminist mother had him in the kitchen to pay for all those years he only did the carving. “You know where that is,”
she would say as he looked for a knife to cut the cheese and a tray to serve it with, his apron wide as a dress above his workboots, confused as a girl. He is the one I think of now, lifting the tray for my family, the guests, until at last he comes to me. And I, no less confused, look down from his hurt eyes as if there were nothing between us except an arrangement of cheese, and not this bafflement, these almost tender hands that once swung hammers and drove machines and insisted that I learn to be a man.
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The
Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also
supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska,
Lincoln. Poem copyright © 2002 by Wesley McNair, whose most recent
book is The Ghosts of You and Me (David R. Godine, 2006). Reprinted from Fire: Poems (David R. Godine, 2002)
by permission of the author.
Ted Kooser served as the U.S. Poet Laureate from
2004-2006. For more information, go to www.americanlifeinpoetry.org
This article appears in Mar 8-14, 2007.
