Poems

TED KOOSER

At the Office Early

Rain has beaded the panes

of my office windows,

and in each little lens

the bank at the corner

hangs upside down.

What wonderful music

this rain must have made

in the night, a thousand banks

turned over, the change

crashing out of the drawers

and bouncing upstairs

to the roof, the soft

percussion of ferns

dropping out of their pots,

the ballpoint pens

popping out of their sockets

in a fluffy snow

of deposit slips.

Now all day long,

as the sun dries the glass,

I'll hear the soft piano

of banks righting themselves,

the underpaid tellers

counting their nickels and dimes.

Commentary On Kooser

The Nebraskan poet Ted Kooser creates a cunning fantasy in this poem, its playfulness allowing a subversive idea to tease the reader through the seductive power of delight.

Notice the sharp observation that reminds us that the ("beaded") spheres of raindrops will reflect images upsidedown in the manner of a camera lens. The inventiveness of the piece hangs on this fact. "Upsidedown" becomes the operative notion of the poem as a whole. An actual bank as a place goes topsy-turvy, and by implication, for the duration of the vision, so does the very strict institution of banking at large, plus, at the next remove of implication, all of our modern money-conscious consumer society.

The poem calls this transversive overturning of the usual order of things a "wonderful music." (What music would typify a regular banking day?).

Money is teasingly disdained in the poem, treated lightly, if you will, via an initial Marx Brothers level of anarchy. But the threat or unease felt behind an uncanny vision of inverted social order becomes "gentled" with the appropriately "soft" dropping of the decorative ferns, the mere "popping" of the pens from their sockets as compared to the "crashing" of the coins.

Add to this softening effect the comparison of the flurry of deposit slips to a "fluffy snow."

Such choices keep the poem's user-friendly comic glee alive, temporizing what could have developed in rougher hands as a thematically heated abandonment of banking, that icon of capitalism.

The poem returns to the use of music as a key figure of speech, continuing the gentling-down with the brilliant "soft piano," a comforting accompaniment to a return of order.

With the gear-shifting "Now" we receive our desired peripety, the structural "turning" of the narrative line. The poem's world comes rightsideup again though Kooser's recognition that he can reverse the initial action through the natural disappearance of the lens-raindrops in the sunshine of returned normality.

We're also left, of course, with the loss of grandeur felt in counting nickels and dimes, with the tedium of ongoing work, the dissatisfaction with the everyday and the mild social protest in the incidental note on the clerks' low pay.

As with all comedy of disorder, we've been taken through a fantasy of released revolutionary energy, then returned with a wry, gentle shrug to the suggestion of how, unaltered, things must continue to be.

A HAIKU

by Bob Hurwitz (M.I.T. student-poet)

Who in this world knows
That my eyes aren't deep brown
But a green hazel?

Commentary:

My student Bob Hurwitz keeps to an exact syllable count of 5, 7, 5 for this haiku, though these days Western translators and writers of the form allow the count to vary widely.

I love this poem for the way it captures a sense of a person feeling lost in an uncaring environment.

M.I.T., primarily an engineering and science school, can seem a sterile place to artistic types. Even its architecture has a monolithic, Stalinist look. But anyone anywhere among a host of strangers should be able to pick up on the pain behind this small poem's one image.

"This world" yields a neat intimacy of tone; the speaker asks his poignant question in a particular environment (some other world would recognize his unique quality). The blurring of individuality in a hurried, crowded institutional setting comes across through the metaphor of misperceived eye-color. Who here sees me as I really am, not lumped into a (false) category?

A sad effect, yes, for the answer must be either no one or mighty few. Yet notice the enlivening associations of the words describing the speaker's actual eye-color: "green" (hue of newness, of plant-life and growth) and "hazel" a particularizing, special color ("blue" wouldn't work, would turn the situation into an improbably broad and dumb common mistake in perception). A sense of the speaker's actual individuality, enlivening the sub-text, is carried by the use of an exacting color-word; his underlying vitality is also suggested by an eye-color that's at the same time the name of a tree!