The Wheeling Year

 

"Black cows in deep shade under a mulberry tree, that part of its shadow that's swishing its tails. They have already eaten the cool, edible parts of the shade, the blue grass, the few violet leaves they could reach, and now they are waiting, their rumps bumped up together, tails slapping each other, gazing out through the flies at the blazing white pasture that goes on forever, that seems to be turning so slowly about them."

"Dead for a dozen years, Mr. Bob Ross, you live on in the TV reruns, permed hair like a bee swarm, big hands, big smile, a kindergarten-teacher voice. Show us again that little tree you say likes it right there by the moonlit path and the moon you tell us is just real happy right next to the mountain. Hundreds of thousands of us have waited to watch you at your easel, holding your magic brushes--the fan brush for clouds, the fitch for rocky peaks. Come back, keep coming back, Bob Ross. We need to know that everything is happy where it is, and that we too might put it there."

"Maybe we carry too much through the door from the past, propped open with a broom that has swept up so much sentiment it has bent to the shape of it sweeping--like a stiff old floor-length skirt still waltzing--then across the wide porch where those we love, living and dead, sit rocking and talking, all drinking longnecks and laughing together, none of them offering help.

Then over the grass, box after box, to the rented U-Haul that is our life, already stuffed with all we haven't been able to part with, stale with dead dreams and packed so hastily we will never be able to get to the wisdom we lugged out early and loaded on first.

Twenty-nine dollars a day is the going rate, about what a person could live on if he had to, and the past is right there in the rearview mirror, following close, painted with slogans, its springs bent down from all we ever were."

These are three selections from Ted Kooser's book of prose The Wheeling Year sent to me by our friend Becky. The last of the three is my favorite. I have appreciated and shared some of Mr. Kooser's poems for several years and now, thanks to Becky, I am enjoying his prose.