The Best American Poetry 2012 (22 page)

Playacting

Early tribal cultures, while celebrating their rites of initiation or sacrifice, retained a very precise and subliminal awareness that the compulsive extremes to which they went . . . were in essence mere playacting, even though the performance could sometimes approach the point of death.

—W. G. Sebald,
Campo Santo

Something inside says

there will be a curtain,

maybe or maybe not

some bowing, probably

no roses, but certainly

a chance to unverse

or dehearse, after all

these acts. For some

fraction of the self

has always held out, the

evidence compounding

in a bank becoming

grander and more

marble: even our

most wholehearted

acts are partial.

Therefore this small

change, unspendable,

of a different metal,

accruing in a strange

account. What could it

be for but passage out?

from
The Threepenny Review

MARY JO SALTER

The Gods

I always seem to have tickets

in the third or fourth balcony

(a perch for irony;

a circle of hell the Brits

tend to call “The Gods”),

and peer down from a tier

of that empyrean

at some tuxedoed insect

scrabbling on a piano.

Some nights there's a concerto,

and ranks of sound amass

until it's raining upward

(violin-bows for lightning)

from a black thundercloud.

A railing has been installed

precisely at eye level—

which leads the gaze, frustrated,

still higher to the vault

of the gilt-encrusted ceiling,

where a vaguely understood

fresco that must be good

shows nymphs or angels wrapped

in windswept drapery.

Inscribed like the gray curls

around the distant bald spot

of the eminent conductor,

great names—
DA VINCI PLATO

WHITTIER DEBUSSY
—

form one long signature,

fascinatingly random,

at the marble base of the dome.

It's more the well-fed gods

of philanthropy who seem

enshrined in all their funny,

decent, noble, wrong

postulates, and who haunt

these pillared concert halls,

the tinkling foyers strung

with chandeliered ideals,

having selected which

dated virtues—
COURAGE

HONOR BROTHERHOOD
—rated

chiseling into stone;

having been quite sure

that virtue was a thing

all men sought, the sublime

a thought subliminally

fostered by mentioning

monumentally.

All men. Never a woman's

name, of course, although

off-shoulder pulchritude

gets featured overhead—

and abstractions you might go

to women for, like
BEAUTY

JUSTICE LIBERTY
.

Yet at the intermission,

I generally descend

the spiral stairs unjustly

for a costly, vacant seat

I haven't paid for. Tonight

I've slipped into D9.

The lights dim. Warm applause

and, after a thrilling pause,

some stiff-necked vanities

for a moment float away—

all the gorgeous, nameless,

shifting discordances

of the world cry aloud; allowed

at last, I close my eyes.

from
The Common

LYNNE SHARON SCHWARTZ

The Afterlife

I dreamed I was in the afterlife, it was so crowded,

hordes of people, everyone seeking someone, staggering

every which way.

Who should I search for? The answer came quick: my mother.

I elbowed my way through strangers till I found her, worn,

like the day she died.

Mother, I cried, and threw my arms around her, but she

wasn't happy to see me. Her arms hung limp. Help me,

I said. You're my mother!

There are no mothers here, she said, just separate souls.

Everyone looks for their mother. I searched for mine, and found her

searching for her mother,

and so on, through the generations. Mothers, she said,

fathers, families, lovers are for the place you came from.

Here we're on our own.

Here is no help, no love, only the looking. This

is what death means, my child, this is how we pass

eternity, looking

for the love we no longer know how to give. I shuddered

myself awake. And yet—my child, she said, my child.

Or did I only dream

that word, dream within a dream?

from
River Styx

FREDERICK SEIDEL

Rain

Rain falls on the Western world,

The coldest spring in living memory everywhere.

Winter in mid-May means the darling buds of May uncurled

On an ice-cold morgue slab, smilingly shaking loose their beautiful hair.

London rains every day anyway.

Paris is freezing. It's May, but Rome is cold.

Motorcycles being tested at the factory in Varese north of Milan are gray

Victims screaming in place and can't get out and won't get sold.

It's the recession.

It's very weird in New York.

Teen vampires are the teen obsession,

Rosebud mouths who don't use a knife and fork.

Germany at first won't save Greece, but really has to.

It's hot hot in parts of Texas, but rain drowns Tennessee, people die.

It's the euro. It's the Greek debt. Greece knew

It had to stop lying, but
timeo Danaos,
they're Greeks, Greeks lie.

Canoeing in the Ozarks with Pierre Leval, the rain came down so hard

The river rose twenty-three feet in the pre-dawn hours and roared.

Came the dawn, there was improbably a lifeguard,

There was a three-legged dog, the jobless numbers soared.

Dreamers woke in the dark and drowned, with time to think this can't be true.

Incomprehensible is something these things do.

They bring the Dow Jones into the Ozarks and the Ozarks into the E.U.

A raving flash flood vomits out of a raindrop. The Western world is in the I.C.U.

Entire trees rocket past. One wouldn't stand a chance in the canoe.

A three-legged dog appears, then the guy it belongs to.

You instantly knew

You'd run into a hillbilly backwoods crazy, itching to kill you.

Berlin and Athens, as the Western world flickers,

Look up blinking in the rain and lick the rain and shiver and freeze.

They open black umbrellas and put on yellow slickers

And weep sugar like honeybees dying of the bee disease.

from
The New Yorker

BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY