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Written by: Ted Kooser

Published: 10 October 2010

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

There’s only so much we can do to better ourselves, and once we’ve done what we can, it still may not have been enough. Here’s a poem by Michelle Y. Burke, who lives in N.Y., in which a man who does everything right doesn’t quite do everything right.

Nocturne

A man can give up so much,

can limit himself to handwritten correspondence,

to foods made of whole grains,

to heat from a woodstove, logs

hewn by his own hand and stacked neatly

like corpses by the backdoor.

He can play nocturnes by heart.

They will not make the beloved appear.

He can learn the names of all the birds

in the valley. Not one

will be enticed to learn his.

Ted Kooser was US Poet Laureate from 2004 to 2006. He is a professor in the English Department of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He lives on an acreage near the village of Garland, Nebraska, with his wife Kathleen Rutledge, the editor of the Lincoln Journal Star.

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 ©2009 by Donal Heffernan, whose most recent book of poetry is

“Duets of Motion,” Lone Oak Press, 2001. Poem reprinted by permission of Donal Heffernan.

Introduction copyright ©2010 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. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

American Life in Poetry ©2006 The Poetry Foundation

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This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.