Ordinary things like throwing a ball or looking at clouds (David Baker)

Today is cool and wet and gray here...such an ordinary Cleveland March day.  I've been struggling with a nasty cold all week, and I am faced today with so many ordinary tasks, like weeks worth of teenagers' laundry, both rotting food and nothing to eat, TVs that have somehow not been fixed since I discovered their problems, the rug upon which the dog did things she shouldn't have is still a mess, I haven't mailed a few things, there are so many bills--you get the picture.  This is an ordinary woe on an ordinary, bleak day; I am feeling a bit bleak about the whole scenario.  Now the good news, of course, is that there is nothing awful happening.  Kids are in Columbus at a State hockey championship, the dog is no longer ill, the sick relative is much improved, my mother is embracing life at 86, and I still have that Mexico blue water in my mind.  Maybe ordinary isn't so bad, but I do wonder during March why we live here (Ok, I wonder this same thing during December, January, and February too).  So how about a few really interesting poems about ordinary things.  I really like this guy, David Baker.  I stumbled on him from Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry series.  he teaches English at Denison (ok, why didn't my son go there??) and he is the poetry editor of the Kenyon Review.  See what you think.


Old Man Throwing a Ball 

He is tight at first, stiff, stands there atilt

tossing the green fluff tennis ball down

the side alley, but soon he’s limber,

he’s letting it fly and the black lab

 

lops back each time. These are the true lovers,

this dog, this man, and when the dog stops

to pee, the old guy hurries him back, then

hurls the ball farther away.  Now his mother

 

dodders out, she’s old as the sky, wheeling

her green tank with its sweet vein, breath.

She tips down the path he’s made for her,

grass rippling but trim, soft underfoot,

 

to survey the yard, every inch of it

in fine blossom, set-stone, pruned miniature,

split rails docked along the front walk,

antique watering cans down-spread—up

 

huffs the dog again with his mouthy ball—

so flowers seem to spill out, red geraniums,

grand blue asters, and something I have

no name for, wild elsewhere in our world

 

but here a thing to tend. To call for, and it comes.

Never-Ending Birds (David Baker)

That’s us pointing to the clouds. Those are clouds

of birds, now we see, one whole cloud of birds.

 

There we are, pointing out the car windows.

October. Gray-blue-white olio of birds.

 

Never-ending birds, you called the first time—

years we say it, the three of us, any

 

two of us, one of those just endearments.

Apt clarities. Kiss on the lips of hope.

 

I have another house. Now you have two.

That’s us pointing with our delible whorls

 

into the faraway, the true-born blue-

white unfeathering cloud of another year.

 

Another sheet of their never ending.

There’s your mother wetting back your wild curl.

 

I’m your father. That’s us three, pointing up.

Dear girl. They will not—it’s we who do—end.