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The Hush of the Very Good

By Todd Boss Todd Boss

You can tell by how he lists

to let her

kiss him, that the getting, as he gets it,

is good.

It’s good in the sweetly salty,

deeply thirsty way that a sea-fogged

rain is good after a summer-long bout

of inland drought.

And you know it

when you see it, don’t you? How it

drenches what’s dry, how the having

of it quenches.

There is a grassy inlet

where your ocean meets your land, a slip

that needs a certain kind of vessel,

and

when that shapely skiff skims in at last,

trimmed bright, mast lightly flagging

left and right,

then the long, lush reeds

of your longing part, and soft against

the hull of that bent wood almost im-

perceptibly brushes a luscious hush

the heart heeds helplessly—

the hush

of the very good.

Todd Boss, “The Hush of the Very Good,” from Poetry (February 2007). Copyright © 2007 by Todd Boss.

Source: Poetry (February 2007).

Biography

Poet Todd Boss grew up on a cattle farm in Wisconsin, and was educated at St. Olaf College and the University of Alaska Anchorage, where he received an MFA. Boss’s pared-down, idea-driven poems are propelled by internal rhyme and balance clarity with a nuanced attention to sound. “I think of poems as pieces of music, or a work of architecture,” he told the Utne Reader in 2009. “The poem is a space that you’re inviting someone . . .

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