A Birthday

The poets are getting older: Kay Ryan is 80, Dana Gioia is 75, Dick Davis is 81, Billy Collins is 85 – and today Ted Kooser turns 87. He's a poet who tends to get dismissed as a Midwesterner dispensing homely wisdom, but I think this is unfair (and reminiscent of the way some have dismissed Willa Cather as a Midwestern chronicler of life on the Prairie, and nothing more). I've posted a few Kooser poems – here and here (and I hope he's having a happier birthday than that hinted at in the poem 'Birthday'). Like Wallace Stevens, Kooser was for many years an executive in an insurance company – and, also like Stevens, he wrote a poem called 'Sunday Morning', but it is no homage and bears little or no resemblance to Stevens's masterpiece. It is more in the nature of a suburban idyll, and very nicely done, I reckon...Sunday MorningNow it is June again, one of thoseleafy Sundays drifting through galaxiesof maple seeds. Somewhere, a mourning dovetouches her keyboard twice, a lonely F,and then…