At the beginning of the famous novel, "Remembrance of Things Past," the mere taste of a biscuit started Marcel Proust on a seven-volume remembrance. Here a bulldozer turns up an old doorknob, and look what happens in Shirley Buettner's imagination.
Discovered
While clearing the west
quarter for more cropland,
the Cat quarried
a porcelain doorknob
oystered in earth,
grained and crazed
like an historic egg,
with a screwless stem of
rusted and pitted iron.
I turn its cold white roundness
with my palm and
open the oak door
fitted with oval glass,
fretted with wood ivy,
and call my frontier neighbor.
Her voice comes distant but
clear, scolding children
in overalls
and highbutton shoes.
A bucket of fresh eggs and
a clutch of rhubarb rest
on her daisied oil-cloth.
She knew I would knock someday,
wanting in.
From "Walking Out the Dark" (Juniper Press, 1984). Copyright (c) 1984 by Shirley Buettner and reprinted by permission of the author. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.
Also at Virtual Grub Street by/about Ted Kooser:
- American Gothic (a review of Delights and Shadows by Ted Kooser. Copper Canyon Press, 2004);
- Ted Kooser and the American Life in Poetry column;
- American Life in Poetry #37: Shirley Buettner;
- American Life in Poetry #32: Kurt Brown;
- American Life in Poetry #31: Gloria G. Murray;
- American Life in Poetry #30: Naomi Shihab Nye;
- American Life in Poetry #26: Claudia Emerson;
- American Life in Poetry #17: Wendell Berry;
- American Life in Poetry #11: David Wagoner;
- American Life in Poetry #10: Marge Piercy;
- American Life in Poetry #4: Ruth Stone;
- More from American Life in Poetry >>>.
Also at Virtual Grub Street from The Poetry Foundation:
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