The Best American Poetry 2012 (14 page)

How to Tie a Knot

If I eat a diet of rain and nuts, walk to the P.O.

in a loincloth, file for divorce from the world of matter,

say
not-it!
to the sea oats,
not-it!
to the sky

above the disheveled palms,
not-it!
to the white or green oyster boats

and the men on the bridge with their fishing rods

that resemble so many giant whiskers,

if I repeat
this is not-it, this is not why I'm waiting here,

will I fill the universe with all that is not-it

and allow myself to grow very still in the center of

this fishing town in winter? Will I look out past the cat

sleeping in the windowsill and say
not-it
garbage can,

not-it
Long's Video Store, until I happen upon what

is not
not-it?
Will I wake up and
BEHOLD!

the “actual,” the “real,” the “awe-thentic,” the
IS?

Instead I walk down to the Island Quicky, take a pound

of bait shrimp in an ice-filled baggy, then walk to the beach

to catch my dinner. Now waiting is the work

I'm waiting for. Now the sand crane dive-bombs the surf

of his own enlightenment because everything

is bait and lust and hard-up for supper.

I came out here to pare things down,

wanted to be wind, simple as sand, to hear each note

in the infinite orchestra of waves fizzling out

beneath the rotting dock at five o'clock in the afternoon

when the voice that I call
I
is a one-man boat

slapping toward the shore of a waning illusion.

Hello, waves of salty and epiphanic distance. Good day,

bird who will eventually

go blind from slamming headfirst into the water.

What do you say, fat flounder out there

deep in your need, looking like sand speckled with shells,

lying so still you're hardly there, lungs lifting

with such small air, flesh both succulent and flakey

when baked with white wine, lemon and salt, your eyes

rolling toward their one want when the line jerks, and the reel

clicks, and the rod bends, and you give up

the ocean floor for a mouthful of land.

from
The Cincinnati Review

NOELLE KOCOT

Poem

With deepest reverence,

I shop for bones.

And what is the candy

And the daylight

And the horse without hunger?

Too many ducts for us to think of,

And here we are punishing the

Lines above our faces.

Enormity is a hoof

With unanswerable sounds,

And the void is filled with fire.

My dream is to fall apart,

To cry for a century,

But I have not cried, not at all.

I keep my distance like the tines

Of a fork from one another,

Dressing, undressing the fabulous wounds.

But now, back to our story,

It has coffee in it, a naked river.

Blessed are we who rapture

An electric wire, blessed be

The falling things about our faces,

Blessed is the socket of an eye

That lights the body, because

In the end, in the very end, it's

Just you. You and you. And you.

from
New American Writing

MAXINE KUMIN

Either Or

Death,
in the orderly procession

of random events on this gradually

expiring planet crooked in a negligible

arm of a minor galaxy adrift among

millions of others bursting apart in

the amnion of space,
will,
said Socrates,

be either a dreamless slumber without end

or a migration of the soul from one place

to another,
like the shadow of smoke rising

from the backroom woodstove that climbs

the trunk of the ash tree outside

my window and now that the sun is up

down come two red squirrels and a nuthatch.

Later we are promised snow.

So much for death today and long ago.

from
Ploughshares

SARAH LINDSAY

Hollow Boom Soft Chime: The Thai Elephant Orchestra

A sound of far-off thunder from instruments

ten feet away: drums, a log,

a gong of salvage metal. Chimes

of little Issan bells, pipes in a row, sometimes

a querulous harmonica.

Inside the elephant orchestra's audience,

bubbles form, of shame and joy, and burst.

Did elephants look so sad and wise,

a tourist thinks, her camera cold in her pocket,

before we came to say they look sad and wise?

Did mastodons have merry, unwrinkled faces?

Hollow boom soft chime, stamp of a padded foot,

tingle of renaat, rattle of angklung.

This music pauses sometimes, but does not end.

Prathida gently strokes the bells with a mallet.

Poong and his mahout regard the gong.

Paitoon sways before two drums,

bumping them, keeping time with her switching tail.

Sales of recordings help pay for their thin enclosure

of trampled grass. They have never lived free.

Beside a dry African river

their wild brother lies, a punctured balloon,

torn nerves trailing from the stumps of his tusks.

Hollow boom soft chime, scuff of a broad foot,

sometimes, rarely, a blatting elephant voice.

They seldom attend the instruments

without being led to them, but, once they've begun,

often refuse to stop playing.

from
Poetry

AMIT MAJMUDAR

The Autobiography of Khwaja Mustasim