John Koethe

Wallace Stevens is beyond fathoming, he is so strange; it
is as if he had a morbid secret he would rather perish than
disclose . . .
—Marrianne Moore to William Carlos Williams
...

There were mice, and even
Smaller creatures holed up in the rafters.
One would raise its thumb, or frown,
And suddenly the clouds would part, and the whole
...

I have a perfect life. It isn't much,
But it's enough for me. It keeps me alive
And happy in a vague way: no disappointments
On the near horizon, no pangs of doubt;
...

I think I like this room.
The curtains and the furniture aren't the same
Of course, but the light comes in the window as it used to
Late in the morning, after the others had gone to work.
...

Sometimes I dream what's called the male dream:
I'm going somewhere not too far away, I'm almost there,
When there's a slight delay—a minor detour of no consequence,
But then another, and another, as I get farther and farther
...

Sometimes I stand in the middle of the floor,
Not going left, not going right.

—Stephen Sondheim
...

. . . humming in the summer haze.

Diane christened it the Bean House,
Since everything in it came straight from an
L.L. Bean Home catalog. It looks out upon two
...

It fills up the space where poems used to be,
Until there's no space left. It's incessant
Phone calls, figuring out money and flights to
Somewhere, nowhere, not knowing what comes next:
...

I used to like being young, and I still do,
Because I think I still am. There are physical
Objections to that thought, and yet what
Fascinates me now is how obsessed I was at thirty-five
...

It starts in sadness and bewilderment,
The self-reflexive iconography
Of late adolescence, and a moment
...

A clumsy hillock
Unmolded like a cake on the meadow
In the Laguna Mountains. Tough yellow-green grass growing up to a tree
As thick as a tooth. In winter, on the road from San Diego,
...

Above a coast that lies between two coasts
Flight 902 turns west towards San Diego.
Milwaukee falls away. The constant passenger,
...

for John Godfrey
1. Animals

Carved—indicated, actually, from solid
...

Is this what I was made for? Is the world that fits
Like what I feel when I wake up each morning? Steamclouds
Hovering over the lake, and smoke ascending from ten thousand chimneys
As in a picture on a calendar, in a frieze of ordinary days?
...

I drove to Oak Park, took two tours,
And looked at some of the houses.
I took the long way back along the lake.
The place that I came home to—a cavernous
...

for Susan Koethe
This is the life I wanted, and could never see.
For almost twenty years I thought that it was enough:
That real happiness was either unreal, or lost, or endless,
...

Snow melts into the earth and a gentle breeze
Loosens the damp gum wrappers, the stale leaves
Left over from autumn, and the dead brown grass.
The sky shakes itself out. And the invisible birds
...

The philosopher David Lewis spun a fantasy of two omniscient gods who know about one world, which might as well be ours. Each knows precisely all there is to know, the grand "totality of facts, not things." Each knows the pattern of the light on each neglected leaf millennia ago. Each knows the number of the stars, their ages, all the distances between them,
...

Words can bang around in your head
Forever, if you let them and you give them room.
I used to love poetry, and mostly I still do,
...

I

In these I find my calling:
In the shower, in the mirror, in unconscious
Hours spent staring at a screen
...