Poetry Corner Monday

Would you look at this, I'm actually posting a Monday post on Monday. Good for me.

Today being a national holiday, you lucky readers get two wonderful poems for the price of one. This week's poems come from the God of the Poetic Word, Sir Ted Kooser. (Yes, again. And yes, you're welcome.)  I chose these last night without realizing that they both leave me feeling hollow in a way I can't quite explain. It's a full, content hollowness, if that makes any sense, like an insult you can't help admiring for its searing creativity. That was kind of a weird thing to say. I shouldn't have said that. Notice, though, that I'm not deleting it. Huh. Well, here you go.

North of Alliance

This is an empty house; not a stick
of furniture left, not even
a newspaper sodden with rain
under a broken window; nothing
to tell us the style of the people
who lived here, but that
they took it along. But wait:
here, penciled in inches
up a doorframe, these little marks
mark the growth of a child
impatient to get on with it,
a child stretching his neck
in a hurry to leave nothing here
but an absence grown tall in a doorway.


Depression Glass

It seemed those rose-pink dishes
she kept for special company
were always cold, brought down
from the shelf in jingling stacks,
the plates like the panes of ice
she broke from the water bucket
winter mornings, the flaring cups
like tulips that opened too early
and got bitten by frost. They chilled
the coffee no matter how quickly
you drank, while a heavy
everyday mug would have kept
a splash hot for the better
part of a conversation. It was hard
to hold up your end of the gossip
with your coffee cold, but it was
a special occasion, just the same,
to sit at her kitchen table
and sip the bitter percolation
of the past week's rumors from cups
it had taken a year to collect
at the grocery, with one piece free
for each five pounds of flour.