Re-freshening: Ted Kooser, via William Olsen's mosquito
'...hauling the heavy/ bucket of dawn...'
The summer is thick with mosquitoes, relentless harpoons needling the brittle fabric of tired skin. And so, let me start with a poem about these demons.
Did you feel it? the devil of it, the piercing hurl of it, the snip and snap, and the quiet divinity of the thing, that bite. The poem itself is a mosquito, with the dash lunging out as proboscis, the mosquito in flight, unseen. It has been snatched out of the air, swift as the action, almost supernatural. To use the words of the poet, Ted Kooser, it is a “re-freshening”.
There's a toy much like a kaleidoscope but without the colored chips. Like a kaleidoscope it consists of a mirrored tube. You look through it and see whatever is at the other end. Turn it toward just about anything and what's beyond you becomes more interesting. This is how some poems work. The poem is the device through which the ordinary world is seen in a new way—engaging, compelling, even beautiful.
- From The Poetry Home Repair Manual, Ted Kooser
Do you not see the mosquito in a new way now? This creature, whose religion is blood, whose creed is the delivery of the fatal blow, whose form, aerial, precipitates in a barrage of words, like the assassin that is known for only one thing. Perhaps you had not given it that much thought, but now you will do a double take.
That last line is lethal, conspiratorial, but also impulsive, as if one can’t keep it in, the enormity of that stolen moment transfixed as the creature - imagine putting that face on even a day.
Often a poem dives unflinchingly into the centre of a thing. It sets you up, the music of its suspense piles up, slowly, surely, like death. It is in the volta, the devastating turn, that the ramparts of the world suddenly fall around you, and you are left holding the pieces.
There is a Ted Kooser poem that I want to share with you, not because it follows this close attentive form, but because in its succinctness, even with a somewhat contemplative beginning, and without direct enumeration, it delivers a volta that makes you skip a beat.
The fact that we see stars not as they are today, but as they were in a distant past, light years away, is, I think, a favourite plaything of poets. I marvel at it, the same way, I marvel at the cliche of two lovers in different places looking at the same moon. But harnessing temporalities, Kooser turns this phenomenon into a psychological awareness, likening the physical turn into nostalgia, and opening up a moment of epiphany. It makes me think of the effect the physical, natural world can have on you, uncorking deep, hidden, impulses. Again - a refreshening.
“…hauling the heavy/bucket of dawn…”
What an image this is! I can see the lines, the extensions, the morning spilling into the world. The contrast of that little bird, in its earnest labour, bringing the largesse of dawn to us with its early song, slaking our thirst with its “sweet-sour/ wooden-pulley notes”. The vision fills the heart, like a sea fills the eye with its expanse. Notice, that it is but one moment that is elongated in the poet’s vision, that arrives in so many senses, so many textures. This deepening of time surrounds the poet, creates atmosphere, and we sit in the midst of the vision, the orbs of our eyes round with wonder, at the very well of the amphitheatre of the bird’s chirping.
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