a metal cube the size of a suitcase

I could recognize a Kirby poem on the page across a room, just as I could recognize one of Emily Dickinson’s.
~Billy Collins

Happy Poetry Friday! I've got poems by David Kirby today. He says, "A lot of my poems are braids I make of found materials; my contribution is to figure out what the different parts have in common and then unite them tonally." By "found materials," he means stories he's picked up along the way.

TAKING IT HOME TO JEROME
by David Kirby

In Baton Rouge, there was a DJ on the soul station who was
always urging his listeners to “take it on home to Jerome.”

No one knew who Jerome was. And nobody cared. So it
didn’t matter. I was, what, ten, twelve? I didn’t have anything

to take home to anyone. Parents and teachers told us that all
we needed to do in this world were three things: be happy,

read the rest here

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THE LOCOMOTION
by David Kirby

Student’s so tired she’s weepy. I just got off a double shift,
she says, and I tell her not to worry, that we’ve all had
terrible jobs but things turn out okay, and then I tell her

about my worst job ever, which was building roads
in Claiborne Parish that summer, the sun itself hot enough,
the tar puddling around our boots like lava leaked

from Dante’s hell. Jules LeBlanc and I bunked together
and drove back to Baton Rouge on the weekends
to do laundry and eat our mothers’ cooking,

but on our last day before we went off to college,
we stopped at a roadhouse and emptied can after can
of Busch beer, the white mountains of the logo

holding out their snowy promise. Somehow...

read the rest here

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MORE THAN THIS
by David Kirby

When you tell me that a woman is visiting the grave
of her college friend and she’s trying not to get irritated
at the man in the red truck who keeps walking back and forth
and dropping tools as he listens to a pro football
game on the truck radio, which is much too loud, I start
to feel as though I know where this story is going,
so I say Stop, you’re going to make me cry.
How sad the world is. When young men died in the mud
of Flanders, the headmaster called their brothers out
of the classroom one by one, but when the older brothers
began to die by the hundreds every day, they simply handed
the child a note as he did his lessons, and of course the boy
wouldn’t cry in front of the others, though at night
the halls were filled with the sound of schoolboys sobbing
for the dead, young men only slightly older than themselves.
Yet the world’s beauty breaks our hearts as well:
the old cowboy is riding along and looks down...

read the rest here

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Chicken Spaghetti has the Poetry Friday round-up. Thanks, Susan!