Introduction by Ted Kooser: This may be the only poem ever written in which a person claps the mud from a pair of shoes! Michael McFee’s poetry is just that original, in all of his books. His most recent is That Was Oasis (Carnegie Mellon Univ. Press, 2012), and he lives in North Carolina.

Ovation

He stood on his stoop

and clapped her sneakers together

hard, a sharp report,

smacking right sole against left,

trying to shock the mud

from each complicated tread,

spanking those expensive footprints

until clay flakes and plus

ticked onto the boxwood’s leaves

like a light filthy sleet

from the rubber craters and crannies

where they stuck weeks ago,

until her shoes were banged clean

though that didn’t stop

his stiff-armed slow-motion applause

with her feet’s emptied gloves,

slapping mate against mate

without missing a beat,

half-wishing that hollow sound

echoing off their neighbors’ houses

could call her back.

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 ©2010 by Michael McFee, “Ovation,” (River Styx 83, 2010). Poem reprinted by permission of Michael McFee and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2015 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 submissions.