Robert Cooperman

March 10, 2023

“I See Him” by Robert CoopermanPosted by

Robert Cooperman

I SEE HIM

I see him everywhere,
our friend who died at twenty-five;
as if it’s his young ghost
protesting, before
he disappears, forever.
 
Once, in a snowstorm,
there he was, head down,
fighting wind, tiny nails of frost,
but with such a smile,
as if he were in the middle
of a snowball fight
when school was closed
for a blizzard.
 
Another time,
he sat behind the wheel
of a sports car,
something sleek as a cheetah.
He had always talked of owning such a car,
so fast, nothing would catch him.
 
And I saw him with a woman
beautiful as biblical Ruth,
as the first petal of spring
opening wide as the arms of angels
when they praise God
and gaze down upon the world
going along, for once, splendidly.
 
Each time, I’m about to shout,
to open my arms and hug him.
But his ghost rushes past,
too hurried by death
for a short chat with an old friend.
 

—from Rattle #7, Summer 1997

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Born and raised on the not so mean streets of Brooklyn, New York, Robert Cooperman now calls Denver home, where he has turned his love of the Old West into a cottage industry of poetry collections about the Colorado Territory and other aspects of frontier life.

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March 9, 2023

“Yard Sale Chair” by Robert CoopermanPosted by

Robert Cooperman

YARD SALE CHAIR

There’s not a yard sale
I can just drive past.
At this one, I’m hooked
by an easy chair: $3.
What, I ask, is wrong with it?
The woman shrugs, half
caveat, half come-on,
so I sit and test it out.
 
My God, I could rest
weary bones forever.
Only later, do I smell it:
like a horse
that’s pulled a junk wagon
the length of America.
Still, my wife observes
after she’s sighed, content
as a woman awakened by a kiss,
the covers can be cleaned.
 
I ease myself into it again,
wonder when it’ll crack,
collapse like an exhausted camel,
or if moths in the thousands
will flutter from a tear
in the fabric: an orange lurid
as a high school team jacket.
 
But Lord, it’s comfortable,
books more enjoyable
while I’m curled in it:
a kindly grandfather
with a soothing voice
and more stories
than the Arabian Nights.
 

—from Rattle #7, Summer 1997

__________

Born and raised on the not so mean streets of Brooklyn, New York, Robert Cooperman now calls Denver home, where he has turned his love of the Old West into a cottage industry of poetry collections about the Colorado Territory and other aspects of frontier life.

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April 2, 2013

“When Father Sang” by Robert CoopermanPosted by

Robert Cooperman

WHEN FATHER SANG

After the War,
my parents threw parties
to celebrate and ease the pain
of friends, relatives, and neighbors
who had died in the Argonne,
the Philippines, Midway,
or some nameless battle.

Sometime during the evening,
Dad would sing, “All the Fine
Young Men,” rendering the sadness
of the First World War
in his cracking kazoo of a tenor.
Afterwards, some of the women
dabbed away tears and eyed Dad
with more than a bit of wistfulness,
even to my young girl’s eyes.

Only Mother hated to hear him
lovingly butcher that song.
She’d order him to shut up,
But he’d finish, then raise a glass,
“To absent friends,”
while Mother boiled and shouted,
“To think I had my pick,
but married a damned stupid ass
of a braying fool everyone laughs at!”

But one time he stormed out,
tired of her insults; everyone ran
after Dad but Mother and Uncle Ian;
neither saw me under the table
while they kissed and groaned,
then pulled apart: Dad finally
convinced to return to his apartment,
his daughter, and his loving wife.

—from Rattle #21, Summer 2004

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November 30, 2008

BLUE RIBBONS AT THE COUNTY FAIR by Ellaraine LockiePosted by

Review by Robert Cooperman

BLUE RIBBONS AT THE COUNTY FAIR
by Ellaraine Lockie

PWJ Publishing
P.O. Box 238
Tehama, CA 96090
ISBN 0-939221-45-4
2008, 64 pp., $12.00
www.creekwalker.com

For a chapbook consisting of poems that all won first-place prizes in various contests, Blue Ribbons at the County Fair hangs together remarkably well. There’s a logical progression to the collection, beginning with personal poems about Ms. Lockie’s native Montana and the hardscrabble life of her farmer father, and progressing more and more outward into the world, with poems about her own marriage, her children, sexual infidelity, and into world events and situations, sometimes recent horrific ones.

“Godot Goes to Montana” opens the collection, and about the only objection I have to this marvelous poem is that I really hate the title, which seems a tad too literary and precious for its subject matter. Other than that, this is a powerful piece of work, opening with detailing what can go wrong in the precarious life of a farmer: “My farmer father waited to see/if crops would hail out or dry up.” The poem, further, is not without a sense of humor and even more important, a sense of hope, since it’s been noted on more than one occasion that farmers have to be the most optimistic people in the world. So despite all the back-breaking manual labor, the hideous accidents that men who work around dangerous equipment fall victim to, and a grandfather who hanged himself out of despair , there’s a sense of earned camaraderie and good cheer by the end of the poem: “To eat fresh sourdough doughnuts/To chew the fat of their existence.”

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