The Wheeling Year by Kooser Ted;

Author:Kooser, Ted; [Kooser, Ted]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000 Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 1732479
Publisher: UNP - Nebraska
Published: 2014-06-29T16:00:00+00:00

Foolish, I stood in the bow of my shadow, my long black canoe, trying to see all the way to the mouth of the river where time runs out, and gulls skim over the surface, filling their bellies with the silvery breaths of the dying. Sit down, I told myself; your shadow can suddenly turn over, pitching you into the undertow. Sit down, I said again, you’ll be there soon enough. Trust in your shadow to carry you there.

———

In front of a store I saw a man in slacks, white shirt, and necktie, cranking a canvas awning down, using one hand, twirling the crank in an expert way as down and down the awning creaked until it took him into its shadow, and at that moment, his free hand reached into the light as if to waggle his fingers in it before it was gone, but then I saw that he was only waving at a passing driver who waved back, pulled down his visor, and drove on.

———

The train of progress no longer stops at my station, but I watch it rush past, whistling. Nearly always, in one of the windows, I glimpse someone I know, in profile, lifting a styrofoam cup, reading the morning paper. But it is not to see my old friends passing that I get up early and sit here with paper and pen. I wait to see what progress will disturb. For example, this morning a damp newspaper from more than fifty years ago blew up into my face, fragrant with soil and geraniums from Decoration Day, and also the strong dark urine of my grandmother’s bull terrier, Fiji.

———

After a 150-year journey in a sloshing hold, then jounced by wagon over cobbled and crowded portside streets, then rocked in a windy, rackety train through days of smoke and nights of sparks, this camel-backed trunk has come to rest in the dusty depot of an attic in Iowa, where little moves, where each morning the sun, its windows flashing, steams slowly out and away, taking new generations to the frontier.

———

Take any old pebble, dull and dusty, just part of a road, and moisten it with spit, and all of its colors will awaken, as if you’d kissed the life back into it, as if it had been waiting for someone like you.

———

It’s only a weathered wood-duck house crudely hammered together from planks and nailed on a tree, and after more than twenty years of waiting it has never attracted a duck. But out of this minor embarrassment—a tale that will never be sung by the fire on winter nights, much less live on for centuries—it has warped and cracked and gained something in character, so that, like any old man or old woman, it appears to have something to say.

———

The most beautiful flowers of courage are not seen in the showy, loose petalled bouquets of our leaders, enormous gardenias perfuming whole banquet rooms. No, they are blossoms like this: a child-sized young woman with a homely

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