The Best American Poetry 2012 (10 page)

Two thousand seeds for the one that engendered you.

Weary of time? I think not. Object lesson

For adepts of the trigonometries

Of Fibonacci—you
are
time, a living

Sundial, tireless tracker of the light's

Trajectory. You know, you flaming thing,

You august standard-bearer for the skies

In their last and greatest clarity before

The cloudy season, you know there is nothing

Random in the way a space is filled.

Nothing ever doesn't make sense. We

Can do the math: each thing will always be

The sum of things that came before it. Write

This message in the borders of the garden:

Phi,
the symbol of the mean you mean,

The disc atop the slim stalk. Yes, and fie,

By the way, on any and all who'd think to call

You weary of time, who'd wrongly reify

Those bending rays, that reverent chin-to-chest

Kowtow. You know of mortal gravity,

Sun-worshipper, you pythia of pith

And oil, you oracle of harmony,

Order and reason. Of course you bow to it.

from
New England Review

JAMES ALLEN HALL

One Train's Survival Depends on the Other Derailed

after Susan Mitchell

In a bar in Chicago like a bar in New York, the anthems hang

in the jukebox air:
I Will Survive, Maybe This Time,

the bartender's nipple ring catching the discoball's shrapnel light,

on a night which begins in wan November, dancing

with a chestnut-haired Aries, the scorch of us hurtling like a train

I want to step in front of. He takes my hand when we leave the bar,

we walk a greasy sidewalk to a private courtyard, he kisses me

and the world goes magnolia, quick white flash back

to the garden I hid in as a boy, interred in a noiseless mangle,

the tree's opalescent sepals masking my upturned face

as I imagine a real life GI Joe come to the rescue, smiling down

into the plot, shovel in hand. He kisses me on a night

so rinsed in purity it begs for its own ending.

The night's begging lodged in me. We're parallel trains

lurching forward, jaunting windows jaggedly aligned.

Don't love the train, it craves to be emptied.

When we part, a February starfield blooming above us

in the dead of winter, he's wiping the kiss off his lips.

Don't miss me,
he says, hailing a cab, paying the driver,

saying goodbye with a sterile hug. I miss the stars,

which had leaned in close. In November, I could die

happy, his saliva drying on my neck, the breeze

violining its song along the sloped avenue.

The song expires on the radio of an overheated car

speeding eastward into the night after the secret courtyard,

after the snow lowered its gentle hammer on the skulls

of lovers, the night I know in my sudden blood

I am going to kill myself. Don't miss me,

the discoball moon says to the lake. Don't miss me

says a boy to the plastic partition, the snow melting

down his face in tracks, in February, on a night

stricken at last of starlight, shocked dumb,

night with its shovel and its covering dark.

from
New England Review

TERRANCE HAYES

The Rose Has Teeth

after Matmos & M. Zapruder

I was trying to play the twelve-bar blues with two bars.

I was trying to fill the room with a shocked and awkward color,

I was trying to limber your shuffle, the muscle wired to muscle.

I wanted to be a lucid hammer. I was trying to play

like the first mechanic asked to repair the first automobile.

Once, Piano, every man-made song could fit in your mouth.

But I was trying to play Burial's “Ghost Hardware.”

I was trying to play “Steam and Sequins for Larry Levan”

without the artificial bells and smoke. I was trying to play

the sound of applause by trying to play the sound of rain.

I was trying to mimic the stain on a bed, the sound

of a woman's soft, contracting bellow, the answer to who I am.

Before I trust the god who makes me rot, I trust you, Piano.

Something deathless fills your wood. Because I wanted to be

invisible, I was trying to play like a woman blacker

than an unpaid light bill, like a white boy lost in the snow.

I wanted to be a ghost because the skull is just a few holes

covered in meat. The skin has no teeth. I was trying to play

the sound of a shattered window. I was trying to play what I felt

singing in the mirror as a boy. I was trying to play what I overheard:

the old questions, the hunger, the rattle of spines. The body

that only loves what it can touch always turns to dust.

What would a mother feel if her child sang “Sometimes I Feel

Like a Motherless Child” too beautifully? A hole has no teeth.

A bird has no teeth. But you got teeth, Piano. You make me high.

You make me dance as only a sail can dance its ragged assailable

dance. You make me believe there is good in me.

I was trying to play “California Dreaming” with José Feliciano's

warble. I was trying to play it the way George Benson played it

on the guitar his daddy made him at the end of the war. My lady,

she dreams of Chicago. I was trying to play “Mouhamadou Bamba”

like a band of Africans named after a tree. A tree has no teeth.

A horn has no teeth. Don't chew, Piano. Don't chew, sing to me

you fine-ass lounging harp. You fancy engine doing other people's

work. I was trying to play the sound of an empty house

because that's how I get by when the darkness in my body

starts to bleed. I was trying to play “Autumn Leaves”

because that's what my lady's falling dress sounds like to me.

Before you, Piano, I was just a rap of knuckles on the sill. I am filled

with the sound of her breathing and only you can bring it out of me.

from
Tin House

STEVEN HEIGHTON

Collision

Away in the eyefar

nightrise over the sapwood, and one likes

under hooves the heatfeel after sun flees, heat stays on this

smooth to the hoof hardpan, part trail

part saltlick now as snowlast moults back

into the sapwood

to yard and rot

and one sees moonrise mounding

over a groundswell, but too soon and swifter

like never the moon one knows, no moon at all,

two
moons fawned, both small, too hot, they

come with a growling and

hold one fast, so chafing for flight

but what, what, what, what

wondering——

and one can't move and can't although one

knows from backdays, eared and glimpsed

through sapwood  budwood  cracklewood   bonewood

flashes of this same Wolfing

now upon one, still

stalls the hooves on the saltlick and the eyebright

creature squeals  afraid?——and one somehow

uphoofed in a bound not chosen high as if to flee with no

trying, no feeling, fallen  flankflat, fawnlike

eyes above in the eyefar closing small

with the world

and now from the stopped thing

comes what  its cub?  legged up on its hinds,

kneels low to touch, but in that awful

touch, no feel  no fear to feel

no at all—

from
The Literary Review

BRENDA HILLMAN