Two Ted Kooser Highway Poems

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted.  Negligence in reading and writing is self-perpetuating.  But weeds need to be pulled.  Boys need to graduate from high school.  Cedar planking needs to be stained.  And of course, there is poker.

Below are two poems by Ted Kooser.  I’ve read a smattering of his work but never read a complete volume.  Comments to follow.

Highway 30  by Ted Kooser

At two in the morning, when the moon
has driven away,
leaving the faint taillight of one star
at the horizon, a light
like moonlight leaks
from broken crates that lie fallen
along the highway, becoming
motels, all-night cafes, and bus stations
with greenhouse windows,
where lone women sit like overturned flowerpots,
crushing the soft, gray petals of old coats.

The “logic,” as I would like to refer to it, of images in these poems is often befuddling.  I think “What does that mean?” and then continue on.  Part of my attraction is based upon the landscape, which is one I am familiar.  Growing up in the Midwest, I often flew through the prairie, the flat farms with grazing cows, sorghum, soybean, and corn.  It is the place that for many is nothing.  

And at the gas stations and cafes, which my ministerial Grandfather R.G. pronounced, “cuhfay,” were the poorly cleaned bathroom with the roll of cloth towels that mysteriously came and exited through the white box mounted on the wall.  No sixteen ounce cans of green tea, CDs, and riblet sandwiches.  More likely, a tube of baloney, an eight-ounce Coke, Dentyne, and road maps.

The roads I remember were no less desolate, no less lonely than today, but they were different.  I recently drove from Atlanta to Des Moines.  In northern Missouri and southeastern Iowa, that desolation still exists.  The port of safety was Hardees and the sterile Rest Stops along four-lane, divided highway. 

But reading poems like this forces me to rethink the way I see, to accept what is, if only temporarily.  It’s like the heat of this triple digit day. The heat must be my friend or my enemy.

Here’s another Kooser poem.

So This is Nebraska  by Ted Kooser

The gravel road rides with a slow gallop
over the fields, the telephone lines
streaming behind, its billow of dust
full of the sparks of redwing blackbirds.

On either side, those dear old ladies,
the loosening barns, their little windows
dulled by cataracts of hay and cobwebs
hide broken tractors under their skirts.

So this is Nebraska. A Sunday
afternoon; July. Driving along
with your hand out squeezing the air,
a meadowlark waiting on every post.

Behind a shelterbelt of cedars,
top-deep in hollyhocks, pollen and bees,
a pickup kicks its fenders off
and settles back to read the clouds.

You feel like that; you feel like letting
your tires go flat, like letting the mice
build a nest in your muffler, like being
no more than a truck in the weeds,

clucking with chickens or sticky with honey
or holding a skinny old man in your lap
while he watches the road, waiting
for someone to wave to. You feel like

waving. You feel like stopping the car
and dancing around on the road. You wave
instead and leave your hand out gliding
larklike over the wheat, over the houses.

Here, to a greater extent, are some startling images that give me some hope for finding awe in the common, the mundane.

Consider

 “... the sparks of redwing blackbirds.”  I like that one.  The birds are on fire.  Alive.  It’s the kind of image that redefines the commonplace, as in Hopkins poem, “God’s Grandeur,” in which he writes, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.   It will flame out, like shining from shook foil...:

And what exactly is “dulled by cataracts of hay and cobwebs?”  The eyes of “dear old ladies” or the barn’s windows?  Does it matter?  The rage for certainty in some poems is pointless.

What a surprise to discover the a “shelterbelt,” is not of Kooser’s invention, but a word commonly used by farmers to describe a planting of trees between fields to slow the wind down and minimize erosion and crop damage.

Hollyhocks?  So long its been since they grew in our yard.  But the oaks on my street have grown so high that parts of my postage-stamp front yard get no sunlight.

I know well how cars and trucks lie in barnyards. The farm of my childhood, was a litter of rusted steel..  My maternal grandfather, John Dzurick, had a Model A parked next to the outhouse.  There was a butte of oil cans, give-gallon lard tubs, and rippled galvanized roofing.