Untitled Document
northfifthstreet poem #3
this is a
public notice like
the ones that say I am not
responsible for
so-and-so’s
debts well we in enos park
who are surely guilty
now
and then of miscreant behavior
but on the whole are working
to
make the near north side a
desirable place to live hereby
declare no responsibility for
that recent bank robber
who
would have had to have lived
in andy anderson’s
apartments
the ones that say jesus is lord
in big gold letters
we’ve looked
all over for his spoor can’t
find any turns
out he doesn’t live
in the seven-hundred block of
north fifth
street springfield he
lives in the seven-hundred block
of north fifth
street auburn we
many good citizens of enos park
might contemplate
how we’d
rob a bank but we would
never ever actually do it
© Jacqueline Jackson 2007
It may be that we are most alone when attending
funerals, at least that’s how it seems to me. By alone I mean that
even among throngs of mourners we pull back within ourselves and peer out
at life as if through a window. David Baker, an Ohio poet, offers us a
picture of a funeral that could be anybody’s.
Afterwards
A short ride in the van, then the eight of us there in the heat — white shirtsleeves
sticking, the women’s gloves off — fanning our
faces. The workers had set up a big blue tent
to help us at graveside tolerate the sun,
which was brutal all afternoon as if stationed above us, though it moved limb to limb through two huge, covering elms.
The long processional of neighbors,
friends, the town’s elderly, her beauty-shop
patrons, her club’s notables . . . The world is full of prayers arrived at from afterwards, he said.
Look up through the trees — the
hands, the leaves
curled as in self-control or quietly hurting, or now open, flat-palmed, many-fine-veined, and whether from heat or sadness, waving.
Poem copyright © by David Baker, whose
most recent book of poetry is Midwest Eclogue (W. W. Norton, 2006). Reprinted from Virginia Quarterly Review (Winter,
2004), by permission of David Baker. American Life in Poetry is made
possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also
supported by the Department of English at the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln.
Ted Kooser served as the U.S. Poet Laureate from
2004-2006. For more information, go to www.americanlifeinpoetry.org.
This article appears in Oct 11-17, 2007.
