By Ted Kooser

Featured Art: “White Deer” by Amy Nichols, Scott Brooks, and Wendy Minor Viny (Passion Works Studio)

But for the big empty section of sky
that he pieces together, branch by branch,
building a forever of light, his work
is all disassembly, in deafening noise,
today from a cup at the end of a boom
that bounces a little, swinging this way
and that as if trying to catch water
dripping out of a ceiling. He’s taking
apart, from the top down, a sick sixty-foot
ash, first cutting away its outer parts,
feather-light as they fall, each reaching
as if to high-five the branches below,
a helper picking them up by their ends
and dragging them to a big gluttonous
chipper that drags them in, screaming
and flailing. Bobbing lower and lower,
the man in the cup, his saw buzzing,
leans out to unstack the heavy spools
of the trunk, reaching to tip them away
to drop with an emphatic thunk
on the litter of twigs and dead leaves
on the lawn, the cup bouncing lower
and lower, spool after spool, the boom
telescoping back into itself and then
finding its place on top of the truck,
as now he climbs out, lifting one leg
then the other, both whole and unsevered,
and backs down the steps, stretches,
pulls off his gloves in the vast silence
that, suddenly, everything’s part of,
those few of us watching feeling as if
we’ve taken too deep a breath of the sky.

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Ted Kooser is a former United States Poet Laureate, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and lives with his wife in eastern Nebraska. He writes for a few hours every morning and writes pretty well about once every two weeks.