The Best American Poetry 2012 (15 page)

I stood for twenty years a chess piece in Córdoba, the black rook.

I was a parrot fed melon seeds by the eleventh caliph.

I sparked to life in a Damascus forge, no bigger than my own pupil.

I was the mosquito whose malarial kiss conquered Alexander.

I bound books in Bukhara, burned them in Balkh.

In my four hundred and sixteenth year I came to Qom.

I tasted Paradise early as an ant in the sugar bin of Mehmet Pasha's chief chef.

I was a Hindu slave stonemason who built the Blue Mosque without believing.

I rode as a louse under Burton's turban when he sneaked into Mecca.

I butchered halal in Jalalabad.

I had been a vulture just ten years when I looked down and saw Karbala set for me like a table.

I walked that lush Hafiz home and held his head while he puked.

I was one of those four palm trees smart-bomb-shaken behind the reporter's khaki vest.

I threw out the English-language newspaper that went on to hide the roadside bomb.

The nails in which were taken from my brother's coffin.

My sister's widowing sighed sand in a thousand Kalashnikovs.

I buzzed by a tube light, and three intelligence officers, magazines rolled, hunted me in vain.

Here I am at last, born in a city whose name, on General Elphinstone's 1842 map, was misspelt “Heart.”

A mullah for a mauled age, a Muslim whose memory goes back farther than the Balfour Declaration.

You may remember me as the grandfather who guided the gaze of a six-year-old Omar Khayyám to the constellations.

Also maybe as the inmate of a Cairo jail who took the top bunk and shouted down at Sayyid Qutb to please please please shut up.

from
The New Yorker

DAVID MASON

Mrs. Mason and the Poets

At that point I had lived with Mr. Tighe

so many years apart from matrimony

we quite forgot the world would call it sin.

We were, in letters of our friends at Pisa,

Mr. and Mrs. Mason, the common name

domesticating the arrangement. (Our friends

were younger, thinking it a novelty.)

You've heard about Lord Byron and his zoo,

how he befriended geese he meant to eat

and how they ruled his villa like a byre

with peacocks, horses, monkeys, cats and crows.

And our friend Shelley whom we thought so ill,

whose brilliant wife was palely loitering,

waiting to give birth and dreading signs

that some disaster surely must befall them.

Shelley of the godless vegetable love,

pursuer of expensive causes, sprite.

He had confided in me more than once

how his enthusiasms caused him pain

and caused no end of pain to those he loved.

Some nights I see his blue eyes thrashing back

and comprehend how grieved he was, how aged.

Genius, yes, but often idiotic.

It took too many deaths, too many drownings,

fevers, accusations, to make him see

the ordinary life was not all bad.

I saw him last, not at the stormy pier

but in a dream. He came by candlelight,

one hand inside a pocket, and I said,

You look ill, you are tired, sit down and eat.

He answered,
No. I shall never eat more.

I have not a
soldo
left in all the world.

Nonsense, this is no inn—you need not pay.

Perhaps it is the worse for that,
he said.

He drew the hand out of his pocket, holding

a book of poems as if to buy his supper.

To see such brightness fallen broke my heart,

and then, of course, I learned that he had drowned.

Once, they say, he spread a paper out

upon a table, dipped his quill and made

a single dot of ink.
That,
he said,

is all of human knowledge, and the white

is all experience we dream of touching.

If I should spread more paper here, if all

the paper made by man were lying here,

that whiteness would be like experience,

but still our knowledge would be that one dot.

I've watched so many of the young die young.

As evening falls, I know that Mr. Tighe

will come back from his stroll, and he will say

to humour me,
Why Mrs. Mason, how

might you have spent these several lovely hours?

And I shall notice how a slight peach flush

illuminates his whiskers as the sun

rounds the palms and enters at our windows.

And I shall say,
As you have, Mr. Mason,

thinking of lost friends, wishing they were here.

And he:
Lost friends? Then I should pour the wine.

And I? What shall I say to this kind man

but
Yes, my darling, time to pour the wine.

from
The Hudson Review
and
Umbrella

KERRIN MCCADDEN

Becca

She says,
It's my birthday, I'm going tomorrow,

What's your favorite font? What should I

have him write? Serifs,
I say.
I like serifs.

I like old typewriters, the keys little platters.

I don't answer the question about what to write.

The vellum of her back. I am not her mother,

who later weeps at the words written between

her shoulders. I get ready to retract the idea of serifs,

the pennants that pull the eye from one word

forward, but the eye loves a serif. When we

handwrite, we stop to add them to
I. Read this

word like typeface, make me always published,

I am always a text.
Write this on your back,

I want to say. Write that you are a lyric

and flying—serifed, syntactical. Becca chooses

Make of my life a few wild stanzas.
She lies

on the bed while the artist marks her back,

his needle the harrow for her sentence. Make of

my life a place to stand, stopping-places, a series

of rooms, stances,
stare, stantia, stay.
She has

shown him a bird she wants perched above the final

word,
stanza.
It is a barn swallow—ink blue flash.

He says, toward the end, so she can know it will hurt

to ink so much blue,
I am filling in the stanza now,

and he stings her right shoulder again and again,

filling the room of the bird. Make of my life

a poem, she asks me and him and her mother

as she walks away, make of my life something

wild, she says. I watch her strike out across

Number 10 Pond, the tattoo flashing with each stroke

and there is barely enough time to read it.

from
The American Poetry Review

HONOR MOORE

Song

Of sheets and skin and fur of him,

bed of ground and river, of land,

or tongue, of arms, the wanton field,

of flame and flowers, stalk of him,

harp, arboreal, steep and rush.

House him in the coil of my hair,

silk of him and open sea, flood, star,

toes of him, stickiness, of flesh.

Rind of him, gaze, of salt and heat,

face, food and blade, island in bright

bloom, bristle, blossom, all this night

lie long with him as dark flies fleet.

Transparent, filled up, emptied out,

here of him, here I find his mouth.

from
The Common

MICHAEL MORSE