Kooser - Lights on a Ground of Darkness

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Table of Contents

BOOKS BY TED KOOSER

Available from the University of Nebraska Press

The Blizzard Voices

Local Wonders

The Poetry Home Repair Manual Valentines

Writing Brave and Free

To the memory of my mother,

Vera Deloras Moser Kooser,

August 25, 1908-March 23, 1998

Mid April already, and the wild plums
bloom at the roadside, a lacy white
against the exuberant, jubilant green
of new grass and the dusty, fading black
of burned-out ditches. No leaves, not yet,
only the delicate, star-petaled
blossoms, sweet with their timeless perfume.

You have been gone a month today
and have missed three rains and one nightlong
watch for tornados. I sat in the cellar
from six to eight while fat spring clouds
went somersaulting, rumbling east. Then it poured,
a storm that walked on legs of lightning,
dragging its shaggy belly over the fields.

The meadowlarks are back, and the finches
are turning from green to gold. Those same
two geese have come to the pond again this year,
honking in over the trees and splashing down.
They never nest, but stay a week or two
then leave. The peonies are up, the red sprouts
burning in circles like birthday candles,
for this is the month of my birth, as you know,
the best month to be born in, thanks to you,
everything ready to burst with living.

There will be no more new flannel nightshirts
sewn on your old black Singer, no birthday card
addressed in a shaky but businesslike hand.
You asked me if I would be sad when it happened

and I am sad. But the iris I moved from your house
now hold in the dustydry fists of their roots
now hold in the dusty dry fists of their roots
green knives and forks as if waiting for dinner,
as if spring were a feast. I thank you for that.
Were it not for the way you taught me to look
at the world, to see the life at play in everything,
I would have to be lonely forever.

John R. Moser, my grandfather

Vera Moser Kooser, my mother

Judy and Teddy Kooser

PREFACE

This is a book I put off writing for more than fifty years because I wanted it to be perfect, which it is not and could never be. In almost every family there is someone like me who desperately wants to write such a story and is forever kept from it by fear of failure.

From the time I was a little boy I dreamed of one day writing a marvelous book about my mothers family. My words, I thought, if ever they were to be written, would in splendor and beauty offer to the world the people I most loved, the family shining at the center of my heart. I would show the John R. Mosers as remarkable, heroic even, not just an ordinary handful of working-class German Americans crowded into a house next to a filling station on the edge of town.

In the autumn of 1997 it became clear that my mother would not live long. Her heart and lungs were failing, she was on oxygen day and night, she had moved into an assisted-living apartment, and she was preparing to die. She was the last living member of her family, and before she was gone I wanted to show her how much I had loved them. I spent that autumn and winter urgently gathering my memories and writing them down, and two months before her death I gave her a copy of the manuscript. I was fearful that my words might make her sad at the sad end of her days, but I took the risk. She read it and, much to my relief, she told me that she liked what I had done.

It did not see publication until after her death, when it appeared in an issue of Great River Review, a Minnesota literary quarterly. I am grateful to the editors there for giving me the first opportunity to present my words to readers other than my mother, there in her chair by the window, looking out at the last of her eighty-nine years.

Those of you who know my Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps (University of Nebraska Press, 2003), will recognize the description of my fathers hands, which first appeared in this essay. And the poem for my mother, which opens this book, appears in my collection of verse, Delights & Shadows (Copper Canyon Press, 2004). I am grateful to the University of Nebraska Press for making so handsome a package of these memories.

Ted Kooser

Garland, Nebraska

September 2004

Time wakens a longing more poignant than all the longings caused by the division of lovers in space, for there is no road back into its country. Our bodies were not made for that journey; only the imagination can venture upon it; and the setting out, the road, and the arrival: all is imagination.

Our memories of a place, no matter how fond we were of it, are little more than a confusion of lights on a ground of darkness.

Edwin Muir

Lights on a Ground of Darkness

AN EVOCATION OF A PLACE AND TIME

Summer, 1949. Above the Mississippi, the noon sun bleaches the blue from a cloudless midsummer sky. So high in their flight that they might be no more than tiny motes afloat on the surface of the eye, a few cliff swallows dive and roll. At the base of the shadowy bluffs a highway weaves through the valley, its surface shimmering like a field of wheat; to the south, a semi loaded with squealing hogs shifts down for the slow crawl up out of the bottoms and into the bright, flat cornfields of eastern Iowa. The bitter odor of exhaust clings like spider webs to the long grass lining the shoulders of the road. Toward the top of the grade the sound of the engine levels out into a brash and steady saxophone note that rattles back through the cut, and then, with a fading whine, the truck is gone, leaving the hot road shining empty down the length of the valley.

The little town of Guttenberg, Iowa, is taking a midday nap under the trees on the bank of the river. Its wide streets are quiet, its window shades drawn down against the heat. Old elms sprinkle the deserted sidewalks with lacy, drifting patterns. Theres a light breeze off the water, carrying the smell of fish and the soft, regular sound of waves lapping the sides of tied-up boats. In one back yard an old woman in a blue bathrobe and a wide-brimmed straw hat walks a plank pathway through her garden, inspecting the leaves of her beans with the tip of a cane.

Front Street, which in any other small town might be called Main Street, divides a shady riverbank park from a row of old store buildings. The Mississippi here is wide and smooth, pooled by a government lock and dam. Beyond the dark green channel islands, the bluffs of Wisconsin rise pale and vaporous. Far out, between two of the islands, a tug slowly pushes a long line of rusty coal barges north toward Minnesota. A few old men sit on shaded benches in the park, swapping stories and watching the river birds loop and skim over the water.

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