American Life in Poetry :: Ron Koertge
American Life in Poetry: Column 609
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
We’ve been selecting poems for this column for more than ten years and I can’t remember ever publishing a poem about a cat. But here at last is a cat, a lovely old cat. Ron Koertge lives in California, and his most recent book of poems is Vampire Planet: New & Selected Poems, from Red Hen Press.
Lily
No one would take her when Ruth passed.
As the survivors assessed some antiques,
I kept hearing, “She’s old. Somebody
should put her down.”
I picked her up instead. Every night I tell her
about the fish who died for her, the ones
in the cheerful aluminum cans.
She lies on my chest to sleep, rising
and falling, rising and falling like a rowboat
fastened to a battered dock by a string.
We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2016 by Ron Koertge, “Lily,” from Vampire Planet: New & Selected Poems, (Red Hen Press, 2016). Poem reprinted by permission of Ron Koertge and the publisher.Introduction copyright ©2016 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.
