Newsletter sign up

Be the first to know when new American Life in Poetry columns are live.

Column 595

In Possession (Minnesota)

Intro by Ted Kooser
08.14.2016

Roy Scheele, one of Nebraska’s finest poets, has a new chap­book called The Sled­ders: Thir­ty Son­nets, from Three Sheets Press. One of any writer’s most valu­able tools is mem­o­ry, and this poem shows it being put to work to breathe life into an after­noon from long ago.

In Possession (Minnesota)

Something almost Flemish about that water,
a golden brown but clear into its depths,
the plank-ends of the dock a fading gray
beside it, and a boat moored at the end;
something, it seems to me in looking back,
about a murky bullhead on a stringer,
one of those rope ones you can hardly see,
so that the fish appeared to scull in place;
something (the details start to widen now)
about white wooden clapboards on the side
of that inn or tavern where my dad had stopped,
a neon beer sign staring out through glass—
late in the afternoon, I drinking deep
of everything I saw, now mine to keep.

Share this column

Disclaimer

We do not accept unsolicited submissions

We do not accept unsolicited submissions. 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 ©2016 by Roy Scheele, “In Possession: Minnesota,” from The Sledders: Thirty Sonnets (Three Sheets Press, 2016). Poem reprinted by permission of Roy Scheele and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.