Poetry Home Repair

A few years ago, when I first read Ted Kooser's Poetry Home Repair Manual, I was a fledgling poet with a fondness for form and a belief that nothing good had been written since T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost. Now, I'm a fledgling poet with a fondness, though not a beholdenness, for form, and I believe Frost and Eliot are among the best poets I've yet had the pleasure to read, but I realize that there are a whole bunch of great poets now living. In Kooser's book, he cites one of his poems, and when I first read it, I had such an awful reaction to it that I wanted to write a long satirical poem degrading Kooser, Collins, and the rest. This morning, however, I reread it, and I fell in love. Here it is, but I'm not sure of the title:

"A Poetry Reading" by Ted Kooser

Once you were young along a river, tree to tree,
with sleek black wings and red shoulders.
You sang for yourself but all of them listened to you.

Now you're an old blue heron with yellow eyes
and a gray neck tough as a snake.
You open your book on its spine, a split fish,
and pick over the difficult ribs,
turning your better eye down to the work
of eating your words as you go.