Maxine Kumin
POETRY MONDAY: MAY 5, 2008
Long before there was a Poet Laureate of the United States, there was a Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Maxine Kumin, one of our most beloved American poets, had that honor. She has also been Poet Laureate of New Hampshire, a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, winner of a Pulitzer Prize as well as many other prestigious fellowships and awards. One or more of her many books (sixteen poetry collections, a stirring memoir, four novels, a short-story collection, four books of essays and more than twenty children’s books) surely must be on some of your shelves already.
Over eighty now, she lives on a farm in New Hampshire with her husband, her horses and dogs. She doesn’t have a brand-new poem for us because they are all, as she says, “bespoke.” But here, with her help in selection, are three that she agreed to share with our readers..
Irene Willis
Poetry Editor
The Kentucky Derby
The Queen stood for what looked
like hours while Barbaro
was honored after they had had
to put him down. Why
do they race them so young?
Money. She wore
a lime green outfit, even
her shoes matched. Her hat
was no surprise to those
of us who remember half
a century of British millinery..
She displayed a keen eye
for the horses but the announcement
that she rides her horse
on weekends tickled me. Weekends!
Is there so much to do Monday
through Friday when you’re
Queen? Dutifully standing
through all the lesser races
and taking the steps without
a hand on railings, that is
queenly. I’d like
to see Her Majesty
some Sunday in the saddle.
from Per Contra (online journal, Spring 2008)
Jack
How pleasant the yellow butter
melting on white kernels, the meniscus
of red wine that coats the insides of our goblets
where we sit with sturdy friends as old as we are
after shucking the garden’s last Silver Queen
and setting husks and stalks aside for the horses
the last two of our lives, still noble to look upon:
our first foal, now a bossy mare of 31
which calibrates to 93 in people years
and my chestnut gelding, not exactly a youngster
at 25. Every year, the end of summer
lazy and golden, invites grief and regret:
suddenly it’s 1980, winter buffets us,
winds strike like cruelty out of Dickens. Somehow
we have seven horses for six stalls. One of them,
a big-nosed roan gelding, calm as a president’s portrait
lives in the rectangle that leads to the stalls. We call it
the motel lobby. Wise old campaigner, he dunks his
hay in the water bucket to soften it, then visits the others
who hang their heads over their dutch doors. Sometimes
he sprawls out flat to nap in his commodious quarters.
That spring, in the bustle of grooming
and riding and shoeing, I remember I let him go
to a neighbor I thought was a friend, and the following
fall she sold him down the river. I meant to
but never did go looking for him, to buy him back
and now my old guilt is flooding this twilit table
my guilt is ghosting the candles that pale us to skeletons
the ones we must all become in an as yet unspecified order.
Oh Jack, tethered in what rough stall alone
did you remember that one good winter?
from Jack and Other New Poems (W.W. Norton, 2005)
The Long Marriage
The sweet jazz
of their college days
spools over them
where they lie
on the dark lake
of night growing
old unevenly:
the sexual thrill
of Peewee Russell’s
clarinet; Jack
Teagarden’s trombone
half syrup, half
sobbing slide;
Erroll Garner’s
rusty hum-along
over the ivories;
and Glenn Miller’s
plane going down
again before sleep
repossesses them…
Torschlusspanik.
Of course
the Germans have
a word for it,
the shutting of
the door,
the bowels’ terror
that one will go
before
the other as
the clattering horse
hooves near.
from The Long Marriage (W.W. Norton, 2001)