Selecting a Reader First, I would have her be beautiful, and walking carefully up on my poetry at the loneliest moment of an afternoon, her hair still damp at the neck from washing it, She should be wearing a raincoat, an old one, dirty from not having money enough for the cleaners. She will take out her glasses, and there in the bookstore, she will thumb over my poems, then put the book back up on its shelf. She will say to herself, "For that kind of money, I can get my raincoat cleaned." And she will. The Widow Lester I was too old to be married, but nobody told me, I guess they didn't care enough. How it had hurt, though, catching bouquets all those years! Then I met Ivan, and kept him and never knew love. How his feet stunk in the bed sheets! I could have told him to wash, but I wanted to hold that stink against him. The day he dropped dead in the field. I was watching. I was hanging up sheets in the yard, and I finished. In the Basement of the Goodwill Store In musty light, in the thin brown air of damp carpet, doll heads and rust, beneath long rows of sharp footfalls like nails in a lid, an old man stands trying on glasses, lifting each pair from the box like a glittering fish and holding it up to the light of a dirty bulb. Near him. a heap of enameled pans as white as skulls looms in the catacomb shadows, and old toilets with dry red throats cough up bouquets of curtain rods. You've seen him somewhere before. He's wearing the green leisure suit you threw out with the garbage, and the Christmas tie you hated, and the ventilated wingtip shoes you found in your father's closet and wore as a joke. And the glasses that finally fit him, through which he looks to see you looking back-- two mirrors that flash and dance-- are those through which one day you too will look down over the years, when you have grown old and thin and no longer particular, and the things you once thought you were rid of forever have taken you back in their arms. Daddy Longlegs Here, on fine long legs springy as steel, a life rides, sealed in a small brown pill that skims along over the basement floor wrapped up in a simple obsession. Eight legs reach out like the master ribs of a web in which some thought is caught dead center in its own small world, a thought so far from the touch of things that we can only guess at it. If mine, it would be the secret dream of walking along across the floor of my life with an easy grace, and with love enough to live on at the center of myself. The Urine Specimen In the clinic, a sun-bleached shell of stone on the shore of the city, you enter the last small chamber, a little closet chastened with pearl--cool, white, and glistening-- and over the chilly well of the toilet you trickle your precious sum in a cup. It's as simple as that. But the heat of this gold your body's melted and poured out into a form begins to enthrall you, warming your hand with your flesh's fevers in a terrible way. It's like holding an organ--spleen or fatty pancreas, a lobe from your foamy brain still steaming with worry. You know that just outside a nurse is waiting to cool it into a gel and slice it onto a microscope slide for the doctor, who in it will read your future, wringing his hands. You lift the chalice and toast the long life of your friend there in the mirror, who wanly smiles, but does not drink to you. Epigraph The quarry road tumbles toward me out of the early morning darkness, lustrous with frost, an unrolled bolt of softly glowing fabric, interwoven with tiny glass beads on silver thread, the cloth spilled out and then lovingly smoothed by my father's hand as he stands behind his wooden counter (dark as these fields) at Tilden's Store so many years ago. "Here," he says smiling, "you can make something special with this." February 16 An early morning fog. In fair weather, the shy past keeps its distance. Old loves, old regrets, old humiliations look on from afar. They stand back under the trees. No one would think to look for them there. But in fog they come closer. You can feel them there by the road as you slowly walk past. Still as fence posts they wait, dark and reproachful, each stepping forward in turn. March 2 Patchy clouds and windy. All morning our house has been flashing in and out of shade like a signal, and far across the waves of grass a neighbor's house has answered, offering help. If I have to abandon this life, they tell me they'll pull me across in a leather harness clipped to the telephone line. Walking on Tiptoe Long ago we quit lifting our heels like the others--horse, dog, and tiger-- though we thrill to their speed as they flee. Even the mouse bearing the great weight of a nugget of dog food is enviably graceful. There is little spring to our walk, we are so burdened with responsibility, all of the disciplinary actions that have fallen to us, the punishments, the killings, and all with our feet bound stiff in the skins of the conquered. But sometimes, in the early hours, we can feel what it must have been like to be one of them, up on our toes, stealing past doors where others are sleeping, and suddenly able to see in the dark. Excerpted from Kindest Regards: New and Selected by Ted Kooser All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.