A Room in the Past

By Ted Kooser b. 1939 Ted Kooser

It’s a kitchen. Its curtains fill

with a morning light so bright

you can’t see beyond its windows

into the afternoon. A kitchen

falling through time with its things

in their places, the dishes jingling

up in the cupboard, the bucket

of drinking water rippled as if

a truck had just gone past, but that truck

was thirty years. No one’s at home

in this room. Its counter is wiped,

and the dishrag hangs from its nail,

a dry leaf. In housedresses of mist,

blue aprons of rain, my grandmother

moved through this life like a ghost,

and when she had finished her years,

she put them all back in their places

and wiped out the sink, turning her back

on the rest of us, forever.

Ted Kooser, “A Room in the Past” from One World at a Time. Copyright © 1985 by Ted Kooser. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, www.upress.pitt.edu. Used by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.

Source: One World At A Time (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985)

Biography

Poet and essayist Ted Kooser is known for his honest, accessible verse that celebrates the quotidian and captures a vanishing way of life. Brad Leithauser wrote in the New York Times Book Review that, “Whether or not he originally set out to…[Kooser’s] become, perforce, an elegist.” Populated by farmers, family ancestors, and heirlooms, Kooser’s poems reflect his abiding interest in the past, but escape nostalgia in part because . . .

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