The Best American Poetry 2012 (17 page)

They're at their old favorite bar. The funeral's over. The question

Commands and divides them. One sees the pictograph

Of the great wheel; another, a figure of closed eyes,

Another, the heavenly throne surrounded by a choir of angels,

Remembered from Sunday School. Scripture,

From many sources, is cited, science invoked

And contradictions exposed. The peacemaker

Among them declares that all the stories are true

But on different planes, you can travel among them

When you're dead, if you want to, even this one,

And find those you cared for and follow them around,

Walk through their pratfalls and the wreckage

And be amazed again at the poignant bravery of the living,

Then the fabulist adds that you want to help, but you can't,

You're a ghost, that's a rule in all the stories,

And that's why both compassion and a coolness of spirit

Can be felt on every street, making the best of a bad deal.

Someone tells a story about Jon, who died

And gathered them here. It brings them to tears.

Another story, and they curse his transgressions.

Then other friends who have died, story and commentary

And rebuttal, they drink, they complicate,

They begin to forget the quirks they loved

And the spirit that flows like a river powerful enough

To ignore the seasons. The lights flash off and on,

The bartender is drying the last of the glasses,

Stories slide under the chairs into the shadows,

Speech reverts to its ancient, parabolic self—
Yea,

Though I walk through the valley
—

And actions lose their agency—
It came to pass
—

The things of the world become scarce,

And what's left spreads its wings

And flies around among them, like bats at dusk.

from
New Ohio Review

ALICIA OSTRIKER

Song

Some claim the origin of song

was a war cry

some say it was a rhyme

telling the farmers when to plant and reap

don't they know the first song was a lullaby

pulled from a mother's sleep

said the old woman

A significant

factor generating my delight in being

alive this springtime

is the birdsong

that like a sweeping mesh has captured me

like diamond rain I can't

hear it enough said the tulip

lifetime after lifetime

we surged up the hill

I and my dear brothers

thirsty for blood

uttering

our beautiful songs

said the dog

from
Poetry

ERIC PANKEY

Sober Then Drunk Again

On the lightning-struck pin oak,

On the swayed spine of the Blue Ridge,

a little gold leaf.

Once I drank with a vengeance.

Now I drink in surrender.

The thaw cannot keep me from wintering in.

I prepare for death when I should prepare

For tomorrow and the day after

and the day after that.

A clinker of grief where once hung my heart.

Memory—moon-drawn, tidal.

The moon's celadon glaze dulls in the morning's cold kiln.

from
The Cincinnati Review

LUCIA PERILLO

Samara

1.

At first they're yellow butterflies

whirling outside the window—

but no: they're flying seeds.

An offering from the maple tree,

hard to believe the earth-engine capable of such invention,

that the process of mutation and dispersal

will not only formulate the right equations

but that when they finally arrive they'll be so

. . .
giddy
?

2.

Somewhere Darwin speculates that happiness

should be the outcome of his theory—

those who take pleasure

will produce offspring who'll take pleasure,

though he concedes the advantage of the animal who keeps death in mind

and so is vigilant.

And doesn't vigilance call for

at least an ounce of expectation,

imagining the lion's tooth inside your neck already,

for you to have your best chance of outrunning the lion

on the arrival of the lion.

3.

When it comes time to “dedicate the merit”

my Buddhist friends chant
from the ocean of samsara

may I free all beings
—

at first I misremembered, and thought

the word for the seed the same.

Meaning “the wheel of birth and misery and death,”

nothing in between the birth and death but misery,

surely an overzealous bit of whittlework

on the part of
Webster's Third New International Unabridged

(though if you eliminate dogs and pie and swimming

feels about right to me—

oh shut up, Lucia. The rule is: you can't nullify the world

in the middle of your singing.)

4.

In the Autonomous Vehicle Laboratory

Roboseed is flying.

It is not a sorrow though its motor makes an annoying sound.

The doctoral students have calculated

the correct thrust-to-weight ratio and heave dynamics.

On YouTube you can watch it flying in the moonlight

outside the engineering building with the fake Ionic columns.

I said “sorrow” for the fear that in the future all the beauties

will be replaced by replicas that have more glare and blare and bling.

Roboseed, roborose, roboheart, robosoul—

this way there'll be no blight

on any of the cherished encapsulations

when the blight was what we loved.

5.

They grow in chains from the Bigleaf Maple, chains

that lengthen until they break.

In June,

when the days are long and the sky is full

and the swept pile thickens

with the ones grown brown and brittle,

oh see how I've underestimated the persistence

of the lace in their one wing.

6.

Is there no slim chance I will feel it

when some molecule of me

(annealed by fire, like coal or glass)

is drawn up in the phloem of a maple

(please scatter my ashes under a maple)

so my speck can blip out

on a stem sprouting out of the fork of a branch,

the afterthought of a flower

that was the afterthought of a bud,

transformed now into a seed with a wing,

like the one I wore on the tip of my nose

back when I was green.

from
The American Poetry Review

ROBERT PINSKY

Improvisation on Yiddish