Since I was eight years old, I have had my breakfast every morning during baseball season while reading the box scores. It's always more fun when the Red Sox win of course, but even when they lose, the box scores still never disappoint. Not familiar with a box score? Wikipedia can explain.

But even in baseball, all good things must come to an end. Julio Franco retired, and this article is a nice tribute to a fine career. I had watched Franco closely the past few years. After Rickey Henderson left the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2004, Franco was the only active player in major league baseball who was older than me. Alas, now I am older than every single one of them. I guess I won't ever be center fielder for the Red Sox after all.

Sunday I return early in the day and, weather providing, coach my younger son's U16 travel soccer team.

So I ask you, kind reader, which is harder--herding cats or getting 18 boys, 16 and under, to listen to you for more than 20 seconds? I know the answer! Especially during last night's practice when I was trying to go over something with them as they prepared to scrimmage the U18 girls' team. But they are great kids, really, and I fully expect their exuberance to be an asset on the field.

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Bad news all too often arrives with a ringing telephone, all too early in the morning. But sometimes it comes with less emphasis, by regular mail. Here Allan Peterson of Florida gets at the feelings of receiving bad news by letter, not by directly stating how he feels but by suddenly noticing the world that surrounds the moment when that news arrives.

The Inevitable

To have that letter arrive
was like the mist that took a meadow
and revealed hundreds
of small webs once invisible
The inevitable often
stands by plainly but unnoticed
till it hands you a letter
that says death and you notice
the weed field had been
readying its many damp handkerchiefs
all along

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c) 2007 by Allan Peterson, whose most recent book of poetry is All the Lavish in Common, University of Massachusetts Press, 2005, winner of the Juniper Prize. Reprinted from The Chattahoochee Review, Winter 2007, V. 27, no. 2, by permission of the author. Introduction copyright (c) 2008 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.

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

From your school days you may remember A. E. Housman's poem that begins, "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now/ Is hung with bloom along the bough." Here's a look at a blossoming cherry, done 120 years later, on site among the famous cherry trees of Washington, by D.C. poet Judith Harris.

In Your Absence

Not yet summer,
but unseasonable heat
pries open the cherry tree.

It stands there stupefied,
in its sham, pink frills,
dense with early blooming.

Then, as afternoon cools
into more furtive winds,
I look up to see
a blizzard of petals
rushing the sky.

It is only April.
I can't stop my own life
from hurrying by.
The moon, already pacing.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c) 2007 by Judith Harris, whose most recent collection of poems is The Bad Secret, Louisiana State University Press, 2006. Reprinted by permission of Judith Harris. Introduction copyright (c) 2008 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.

I am reviewing an eBook device and decided to see what it would like to re-read Heart of Darkness on it. The verdict? I think I am sold on eBook devices, and Conrad is still brilliant.

• C--Kenji Johjima
• 1B--David Ortiz
• 2B--Plácido Polanco
• 3B--Kevin Youkilis
• SS--Derek Jeter
• OF--Vernon Wells
• OF--Jacoby Ellsbury
• OF--Raúl Ibañez
• Util--Frank Thomas
• Bench--Evan Longoria, Melky Cabrera, Casey Blake, Bengie Molina, Mark DeRosa
• Starting Pitchers--Jake Peavy, Roy Halladay, Dontrelle Willis
• Relief Pitchers--Jonathan Papelbon, Takashi Saito, Todd Jones, George Sherrill

I don't feel like I have enough pitchers. (You never have enough pitching in baseball, right?)

Let the games begin! The Sox open in Japan this coming Wednesday. I hope it's warmer here than it is here, though I believe the games are going to be held indoor.

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

We greatly appreciate your newspaper’s use of this column, and today we want to recognize newspaper employees by including a poem from the inside of a newsroom. David Tucker is deputy managing editor of the New Jersey “Star-Ledger” and has been a reporter and editor at the “Toronto Star” and the “Philadelphia Inquirer.” He was on the “Star-Ledger” team that won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news. Mr. Tucker was awarded a Witter-Bynner fellowship for poetry in 2007 by former U. S. Poet Laureate, Donald Hall.

Today’s News

A slow news day, but I did like the obit about the butcher
who kept the same store for fifty years. People remembered
when his street was sweetly roaring, aproned
with flower stalls and fish stands.
The stock market wandered, spooked by presidential winks,
by micro-winds and the shadows of earnings. News was stationed
around the horizon, ready as summer clouds to thunder--
but it moved off and we covered the committee meeting
at the back of the statehouse, sat around on our desks,
then went home early. The birds were still singing,
the sun just going down. Working these long hours,
you forget how beautiful the early evening can be,
the big houses like ships turning into the night,
their rooms piled high with silence.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Poem copyright © 2006 by David Tucker. Reprinted from Late for Work by David Tucker, Mariner Books, 2006, by permission of the author. First printed in Montana Journalism Review. Introduction copyright © 2008 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.