This Poem


is a clothesline hanging 
between two trees; 
the words, hung by wooden
pegs, move with the wind.
Between the lines, punctuations
of iris, peonies, bleeding hearts,
and a meadow that stretches
as far as the pines.  It has been raining
all night.  Someone I once loved
appears in the margins; I no longer
remember his name.  The wind roams
through the trees, and two crows
resume their argument, not caring 
anymore who’s wrong, who’s right,
make inky tracks across the page.
The fog of memory blurs the text,
words running wild in the field.
I hear horns blowing, as the boat 
comes into the harbor, my grandmother,
a small girl, looking over the rail 
as the new world rises before her.
I smell steam rising from ironed cotton
as my mother slicks down the sheets.
The blank pages flap in the breeze.
What else can this poem contain,
except the world, and everything in it?

-from Line Dance (Word Press, 2008)



Very Long Afternoons
Those were the long afternoons when poetry left me.
                                   -Adam Zagajewski, “Long Afternoons”

Today, the sky’s a bowl of blue, stippled by high cirrus clouds 
that the wind has combed through, and the air is full of roses
and birdsong. But I’m having a black dog Franz Wright 
I Hate Myself and Want to Die Day, at a well-bottom loss 
for words.  Literature will lose, sunlight will win, don’t worry,
he wrote, and sure enough, there’s the sun, ahead by a furlong,
hurtling down the hardpacked track, hoofbeats a roll of muffled
thunder.  I’m late out of the gate, plodding in the back.  Everyone
else, writers with books, the hot new MFAs, is in a lather,
speeding down the backstretch and into the money.  I’m trying
to write a line or two, or maybe just an image. The soft breeze 
is full of peonies, iris, as if some baker had sugared the air, 
and the late afternoon sun glazes everything golden. 
Wake me when it’s over, this life.

-from Gold (Cascade Books, 2013)

 

Against Nostalgia
“We’re not interested in poems about somebody’s dead grandmother. 
We want to be elevated, not depressed.  Where did the idea come from 
that poetry and nostalgia go hand in hand?”           --editorial guidelines

We don’t care how good her eggplant parmagiana was, or how many afghans she knitted.
We don’t want to hear about how your marriage unraveled, an inch at a time, 
or your best friend’s one on one with the Big C.
Nor do we care where you spent your vacation, how your luggage
got lost on the way to Provence, or what baggage from childhood
you still carry with you.  Nobody wants to read about the schoolroom 
where you diagrammed sentences on the blackboard, then got to clean erasers,
clapping up clouds of chalkdust as a reward.  We hate the yellow glow of nostalgia
that seeps out of the windows in the house where you grew up;
we detest the chintz prints, the antimacassars.  And we don’t want
to hear your scratchy 45s, those golden oldies, or page through 
your yearbook, row after row of girls with bubble cuts and Peter Pan collars.
We want to be exalted, uplifted; we want to soar like red-tailed hawks
on warm thermals, rise above the blood, the dirt, the earth.

-from Radiance (Word Press, 2005)



Poetry is for Everybody


it shouts in bright blue letters on a lime green postcard
someone sent me from Iowa, but I’m not so sure.  Do
the men in hard hats at Bethlehem Steel, molten pig
iron pouring from a cauldron behind them, turn
to slim volumes after work or golden tumblers
of Budweiser as they check the scores on ESPN?
What about the bathers at Rockaway Beach, waves
coming in stanza after stanza, as they lounge 
on their lawn chairs, enjoying the brief caesura
of a two week vacation?  Or the brides in tulle
gowns, who swish and rustle as they stroll
down flower-filled aisles?  Or the fly fisherman 
as he casts his singing line, waits for mayflies
to hatch, who knows timing is everything, who 
is willing to stand all day in water up to his waders
while he flings his silky filament waiting 
for a rainbow to strike, but most of the time,
goes home with nothing but an empty creel. 

-first published in Gander Press Review, 2008



MY FRIEND E-MAILS THAT SHE'D LIKE TO QUIT HER JOB, BUT SHE DOESN'T HAVE TIME

 
to resign.  She writes, "Where has the fall fallen to?"
Corporate memos and annual reports pile up around her
like so many colored leaves.
The treadmill:  work, commute, supper, errands,
skim the paper, scan the mail, fall into bed,
do it again tomorrow.  Outside the window,
there's a maple tree that's green and gold, red and orange,
all at the same time.  Every day the colors shift, intensify.
Today I walked the dog in the leaf-turned woods, the pine-
drenched air; even the light was golden.  I picked
up two bags of drops for the neighborhood cider run,
and ate one for lunch with a wedge of crumbly cheese.
The crisp snap, the juicy flesh, the rosy skin.
Then I waxed the kitchen cabinets until they glowed
like old honey, and I wrote a few lines.
I received no pay.
Here in poetry's lonely offices, no hope of promotion,
no IRAs.  Around me, yellow sheets of paper cover the table,
spill onto the floor.

from Barbara Crooker: Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press, 2015).