Untitled Document
ypoolceiling poem #1
it’s
not totally boring the
flat white y pool ceiling
in the middle squats
a fat metal
disk and ranged neatly up the sides
smaller disks maybe a
sow belly
her navel and enough titties for twelve
piglets but I never saw a sow’s navel
that
big in fact I’ve never even seen
a sow’s navel it would be
awkward and
likely dangerous to look but I’ve
stroked
plenty of piglet tummies
smooth even soon after birth so I
can
extrapolate no this comparison isn’t
going to work
I’ll have to think of
another during tomorrow’s backstroke
©Jacqueline Jackson 2006
A horse’s head is big, and the closer you get to
it, the bigger it gets. Here is the Idaho poet, Robert Wrigley, offering us
a horse’s head, up close, and covering a horse’s character,
too.
Kissing a Horse
Of the two spoiled, barn-sour geldings
we owned that year, it was Red —
skittish and prone to explode
even at fourteen years — who’d let me
hold to my face his own: the massive labyrinthine
caverns of the nostrils, the broad plain
up the head to the eyes. He’d let me stroke
his coarse chin whiskers and take
his soft meaty underlip
in my hands, press my man’s carnivorous
kiss to his grass-nipping upper half of one, just
so that I could smell
the long way his breath had come from the rain
and the sun, the lungs and the heart,
from a world that meant no harm.
Reprinted from Earthly
Meditations: New and Selected Poems, published
in 2006 by Penguin. Copyright © Robert Wrigley 2006, and reprinted by
permission of the author. 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.
Ted Kooser served as the U.S. Poet Laureate from
2004-2006. For more information, go to www.americanlifeinpoetry.org.
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