Kooser's "The Time of Their Lives"

Ted Kooser in The Poetry Home Repair Manual applauds the conversational opening that pulls the reader into the heavier depth of an awaiting poem. This is exactly what he does in “The Time of Their Lives.” The reader is pulled into the pastoral world of the ducks eating Jonathan apples, and is allowed to delight in the innocence of the ducks compared to “nuns on a picnic” and to delight in the Disney-notion of their laughter as they roll the apples around in the grass.

Even the second stanza where their awareness of the external world is heightened fails to alert the reader to the danger that lies ahead. The end sentence, “Their black eyes sparkle,” reinforces the duck-joy of the moment. It is only on a second read that the “papery rattle,” “sweat-bee,” and the leaf that “sifts the wind” have an ominous sound that the ducks in their glee miss.

The third stanza configures the turn in the poem in its graduated series of warnings. First, there is the “ice in the reeds,” a signal to any duck that the joys of summer are on the wane. Then, the narrator reveals his complicity in the scenario that is about to change the lives of the ducks when he talks of the cage he has built in the “dark garage.” The movement quickens with the reality of impending death with the entrance of the “hard young farm wife easy with killing.” Because the reader has been pulled into the perspective of the ducks in the beginning of the poem, he or she is trapped by the irony that when they are “packaged like gifts,” they are “heavy as hearts.” The reader suffers the heavy-hearted response that the ducks do not know to feel.

The complicity of the narrator in the natural design in which the ducks are trapped is established in the opening line of the last stanza by the “sturdy” cage, “quick to close,” and by the two concluding correspondences between the narrator’s carpentry and the reality of predators in the duck-world. The “hammer tapped” and the ducks listen to the passing of the “bull snake,” and the “cry of the table saw” is the background for the final sound that the ducks hear in the poem: “a hawk’s wings dust the blue bowl of the sky.”

The final image of the poem captures the reality to which the poem progresses. Happiness and pain are always only a hairbreadth apart. That close connection is configured by the hawk’s wings (the image of death/destruction) dusting the blue bowl of the sky (supreme happiness and joy). The title of the poem suggests the dual reality of the two halves of the poem. The first two stanzas suggest the colloquial meaning of the clause, an extraordinary good time. The last two stanzas suggest the temporal reality of the clause.