Quotes from Ted Kooser

The butterfly jots a note on the wind to remind itself of something.

Flecks of foam on the fountain's lips as it reads aloud from the scripture of water.

Sunny and clear. Fate, here I stand, hat in hand, in my fifty-ninth year, a man of able body and a merry spirit. I'll take whatever work you have.

A man-made satellite slowly pencils a line through one long passage in the lore of stars, but for those who know the constellation's stories, nothing can alter them.

The past few weeks, I've been seeing coyote hunters during the day with their jeeps and pickups parked by the road, talking into walkie-talkies, dead-serious looks on their faces. In their camouflage clothes, they look like members of a SWAT team about to break into a methamphetamine lab. They must imagine that there's some danger. Are the coyotes armed and dangerous?

january 21 Cloudy and still. On the sunny, southerly face of a cutbank, a badger has scooped a new burrow, turning the slope inside out and pouring it full of the very worst kind of darkness, the kind animals own, like the mad black slit in a goat's eye.

Surviving" There are days when the fear of death is as ubiquitous as light. It illuminates everything. Without it, I might not have noticed this ladybird beetle, bright as a drop of blood on the window's white sill. Her head no bigger than a period, her eyes like needle points, she has stopped for a moment to rest, knees locked, wing covers hiding the delicate lace of her wings. As the fear of death, so attentive to everything living, comes near her, the tiny antennae stop moving.

The eye contains the world, in a space no bigger than a baby's fist.

A Happy Birthday - 1939- This evening, I sat by an open window and read till the light was gone and the book was no more than a part of the darkness. I could easily have switched on a lamp, but I wanted to ride this day down into night, to sit alone and smooth the unreadable page with the pale gray ghost of my hand.

Our words were a few colorful leaves afloat on a very old silence, the kind with a terrifying undertow, and we stood right at its edge, wrapping ourselves in our own arms because of the chill, and with old voices called back and forth across all those years until we could bear it no longer, and turned from each other, and walked away into our countries.

Te sientes así; con ganas de dejar que tus neumáticos se desinflen, de dejar a los ratones construír un nido en tu silenciador, como si fuera no más que un camión en la maleza, cacareando con pollos o pegajoso con miel o sosteniendo a un frágil anciano en tu regazo mientras contempla el camino, esperando a alguien para saludarlo.

The imagination's kisses are a cloud of butterflies.

Boarding House The blind man draws his curtains for the night and goes to bed, leaving a burning light above the bathroom mirror. Through the wall, he hears the deaf man walking down the hall in his squeaky shoes to see if there's a light under the blind man's door, and all is right.

The patience of the spider's web is not disturbed by dew.

I like the idea of there being times when even words cost so much you used them sparingly. I have known a lot of old men and women who talked as if they were paying Western Union by the word.