American Life in Poetry

Sun., May 3, 2015

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

Seventy years ago, when I entered Beardshear Elementary in Ames, Iowa, the school employed a custodian, Mr. Shockley, who had for an office a closet under the stairs. I wish I could thank him for mopping up all our vomit and helping us buckle our galoshes. Here’s a fine poem about custodians by David Livewell, from New Jersey, whose most recent book of poems is ”Shackamaxon” (Truman State University Press, 2012).

Custodians

Retired from other trades, they wore

Work clothes again to mop the johns

And feed the furnace loads of coal.

Their roughened faces matched the bronze

Of the school bell the nun would swing

To start the day. They limped but smiled,

Explored the secret, oldest nooks:

The steeple’s clock, dark attics piled

With inkwell desks, the caves beneath

The stage on Bingo night. The pastor

Bowed to the powers in their hands:

Fuses and fire alarms, the plaster

Smoothing a flaking wall, the keys

To countless locks. They fixed the lights

In the crawl space above the nave

And tolled the bells for funeral rites.

Maintain what dead men made. Time blurs

Their scripted names and well-waxed floors,

Those keepers winking through the years

And whistling down the corridors.

Poem copyright 2014 by David Livewell, from Southwest Review (Vol. 99, no. 2, 2014), and reprinted by permission of the author and 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.