Welcome back to the Daily Poem here in the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kerr.

Today's poem is from Ted Cooser, an American poet born in 1939, who served as Poet Laureate from 2004 to 2006.

He was one of the very first poet laureates selected from the Great Plains.

The poem that I'm going to read today is called Splitting an Order.

It is from his collection of the same title from 2014, that collection being splitting in order.

I'm actually reading it out of a collection that came out last year called Kindest Regards New and Selected Poems.

Great book. If you get your hands on that, I highly recommend it. This is how it goes. I like to watch an old man

cutting a sandwich in half, maybe an ordinary cold roast beef on whole wheat bread, no pickles or onion, keeping his shaky hands

steady by placing his forearms firm on the edge of the table, and using both hands, the left

to hold the sandwich in place and the right to cut it surely corner to corner, observing his progress

through glasses that moments before he wiped with his napkin,

and then to see him lift half onto the extra plate that he asked the server to bring,

and then to wait, offering the plate to his wife while she slowly unrolls her napkin

and places her spoon, her knife, and her fork in their proper places,

then smooths the stretched white napkin over her knees and meets his eyes and holds out both

old hands to him.

Cooser has been described as a sort of poet for the every man.

In fact, he started a newspaper column called American Life and Poetry,

and he claimed that his goal was to introduce simple poems about ordinary subjects to people

who might not otherwise read poetry.

That's how it was put in a writer's

almanac blog post from several years ago. In that same blog post, he talked about what prompted

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