Introduction by Ted Kooser: 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.

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 ©2016 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.

Introduction by Ted Kooser: This column is more than ten years old and I've finally gotten around to trying a little origami! Here's a poem about that, and about a good deal more than that, by Vanessa Stauffer, who teaches writing at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan.

Lessons

To crease a sheet of paper is to change

its memory, says the origami

master: what was a field of snow

folded into flake. A crane, erect,

structured from surface. A tree

emerges from a leaf—each form undone

reveals the seams, pressed

with ruler's edge. Some figures take

hundreds to be shaped, crossed

& doubled over, the sheet bound

to its making—a web of scars

that maps a body out of space,

how I fashion memory: idling

at an intersection next to Jack Yates High,

an hour past the bell, I saw a girl

fold herself in half to slip beneath

the busted chain-link, books thrust

ahead, splayed on asphalt broiling

in Houston sun. What memory

will she retain? Her cindered palms,

the scraped shin? Braids brushing

the dirt? The white kite of her homework

taking flight? Finding herself

locked out, or being made

to break herself in.