Weather Central by Ted Kooser

Author:Ted Kooser [Kooser, Ted]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780822979289
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

The Gilbert Stuart Portrait of Washington

You know it as well as the back of your hand,

that face like a blushing bouquet

of pink peonies set in the shadows of war,

the father of our country, patient,

sucking the past from his wooden teeth.

His famous portrait, never completed,

hung on the wall at the front of the classroom

next to a black octagonal clock

with the ghost of a teacher trapped inside,

tapping out time with a piece of chalk.

It was easy to see his attention

was elsewhere. He'd left a dozen campfires

burning out there at the front of his face,

then retreated behind them. At fifty-eight,

he was old and broken. This was no way

to use up the days of a soldier.

Celebrity irked him. He had little time

for the likes of Gilbert Stuart, that son

of a snuff-grinding Tory, that slackard

who sat out the war with the English.

Perched on a chair in a cold stone barn,

according to Stuart, he smiled only once,

when a stallion ran past. He cared more

for thoroughbred horses and farming

than he did for the presidency.

On the wall between us and the future,

at the point where all of the lines converged,

George Washington, like any other man,

suppressed a deep sigh. So heavy was life;

how futile it seemed to protest.

We learned our lessons while the big clock

clacked, its Roman numerals arranged

in a wreath and sealed under glass. Those were

lovely calico autumns; then winter passed

with its long, clean pennants of light;

then spring with its chaffy rustle. We thought

those aisles were parallel, that our days

would never arrive at the vanishing point.

Before us always, he who could never tell a lie

kept his jaws closed on the truth.

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