Ted Kooser, US Poet Laureate from 2004 to 2006. Photo by UNL Publications and Photography.

Somebody tells somebody else about something that happened. It comes naturally. We’ve been doing that for as long as our species has been around. But to elevate an anecdote into art requires more than just relating an incident. It requires a talent for pacing, for detail, for persuasion, and more. Here David Black, of Virginia, tells a good story in an artful manner.

Sleepers

A sleeper, they used to call it—

four passes with the giant round saw

and you had a crosstie, 7 inches by 9 of white oak—

at two hundred pounds nearly twice my weight

and ready to break finger or toe—

like coffin lids, those leftover slabs,

their new-sawn faces turning gold and brown

as my own in the hot Virginia sun,

drying toward the winter and the woodsaw

and on the day of that chore

I turned over a good, thick one

looking for the balance point

and roused a three-foot copperhead,

gold and brown like the wood,

disdaining the shoe it muscled across,

each rib distinct as a needle stitching leather,

heavy on my foot as a crosstie.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2000 by David Black, whose most recent book of poetry is The Clown in the Tent, Persimmon Tree Press, 2010. Reprinted by permission of David Black. Introduction copyright ©2011 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. They do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.