Wednesday, May 14, 2025

I love this poem. It's a painting with words.

The Coffee Cup

by Donald Hall

The newspaper, the coffee cup, the dog’s

impatience for his morning walk:

These fibers braid the ordinary mystery.

After the marriage of lovers

the children came, and the school bus

that stopped to pick up the children,

 

and the expected death of the retired

mailman Anthony “Cat” Middleton

who drove the school bus for a whole

schoolyear, a persistence enduring

forever in the soul of Marilyn

who was six years old that year.

 

We dug a hole for him. When his widow

Florence sold the Cape and moved to town

to live near her daughter, the Mayflower

van was substantial and unearthly.

Neither lymphoma nor a brown-and-white

cardigan twenty years old

 

made an exception, not elbows nor

Chevrolets nor hills cutting blue

shapes on blue sky, not Maple Street

nor Main, not a pink-striped canopy

on an ice cream store, not grass.

It was ordinary that on the day

 

of Cat’s funeral the school bus arrived

driven by a woman called Mrs. Ek,

freckled and thin, wearing a white

bandana and overalls, with one

eye blue and the other gray. Everything

is strange; nothing is strange:

 

yarn, the moon, gray hair in a bun,

New Hampshire, putting on socks.

__________

From Old and New Poems, Ticknor & Fields, 1990.

 

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