American Life in Poetry

Sun., June 21, 2015

Ted Kooser U.S. poet laureate, 2004-06

I love richly detailed descriptive poems, and this one by Barbara Crooker, who lives in Pennsylvania, is a good example of how vivid a picture a poem can offer to us. Her most recent book is “Selected Poems,” (Future Cycle Press, 2015).

Strewn

It’d been a long winter, rags of snow hanging on; then, at the end

of April, an icy nor’easter, powerful as a hurricane. But now

I’ve landed on the coast of Maine, visiting a friend who lives

two blocks from the ocean, and I can’t believe my luck,

out this mild morning, race-walking along the strand.

Every dog within fifty miles is off-leash, running

for the sheer dopey joy of it. No one’s in the water,

but walkers and shellers leave their tracks on the hardpack.

The flat sand shines as if varnished in a painting. Underfoot,

strewn, are broken bits and pieces, deep indigo mussels, whorls

of whelk, chips of purple and white wampum, hinges of quahog,

fragments of sand dollars. Nothing whole, everything

broken, washed up here, stranded. The light pours down, a rinse

of lemon on a cold plate. All of us, broken, some way

or other. All of us dazzling in the brilliant slanting light.

Poem copyright 2015 by Barbara Crooker, from “More” (C&R Press, 2010), and reprinted by permission of Barbara Crooker and the publisher. American Life in Poetry is supported by The Poetry Foundation and the English department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.