The Best American Poetry 2015 (14 page)

They're not all white faces, and this poem

is not a public poem.

Not all poems are meant to entertain,

like Jericho said, named

after that city by that river

in the hot place so many people

have lived in, so many hostages

been taken in, so many,

so many—whose offices I can't name or know—

no, not entertain, but sing just the same,

a polyphony of song

birds in the morning,

snow geese aflight, guns rocketing,

barrel out, sound through

the beating blood,

bleating animals, beseeching

all those river gods

for some respite from this suffering.

[Each a lawn weed having grown

up in some crevice,

against the wall of each life,

flowering heads all in all

and each in one, this explosion

on the seed-headed planet,

fractal imagining, and this

is my imagining, this declaimed
I
]

Though some of you—

even though this is not a public poem—

will say the I is dead; there is no self;

no things but in ideas

dead, yet no ideas in things either;

and then the accumulation

of linguistic artifacts heats up like a

like a like a

lava lamp.

[All Spencer's Gifts' glow and thrift store chic.]

And you will not be warmed by it,

but who is this
you
?

Because if there is no
I
,

there can be no
we
,

and I am not willing to surrender to that.

[to no
us-ness
, to you not being

one sole being on the other end

of this
this-ness
, but only part

of some conglomerate, corporate

entity called nothing-we-can-comprehend.

I am unwilling;

I am a dissenter.

I am
.]

Which renders the corporation something

more than
they
,

which is almost always paralytic or amoral,

certainly unsympathetic and unsympathizable,

something  approaching  evil.

Just you.  And me.  Please.

First, I claim this
I
, that only has this

language(s), technology(s), space,

time, sex, gender, religion

or lack thereof,

sensibility,    sense,

a body, a body in time,

in sex, in faith and betrayal

and reason and reasoning:

out of this great unsynthesized manifold,

all penetration and penetrating.

[Like a seed head blown apart,

all pollination and flowering

and dried and falling away

and lifting and airborne and borne

away from each other to land

and germinate and survive

in the meagerness of conditions,

the little dying, the little survivals.]

An image, Williams said; an idea, said Stevens,

ancestors we think of: lion's teeth leaves, prickly

and persevering, no things but in ideas, really?

So much depends upon this small boy

who doesn't look like any small boy you know;

he is my small boy—the I of this
this-ness
—

with small bones and wide dark eyes,

hair as straight and black as spun obsidian.

So much depends upon a child like him, this one I love,

sitting in calf-high grass, so new-green, the edges

blaze white, and the dandelions all sprung overnight,

one night in this boy's newborn awareness,

as new as any child's, burying his face in the common

and undervalued florets, eyes blazing with YELLOW!!

Mind cracking—everywhere this cracking—a portal

into a new way of being, the dancing around him,

the buzz of new insects, the spray of misting winds;

it is all so amazing, this world of wonder.

from
Verse Daily

bichwa ke mare ordhniya ke torde
,

tohar najariya jaherile jaherile

A scorpion stings me; its toxins swim my veins,

one ill prick from you and I writhe in your fever.

I dream I cough up a songbird I release to the sky,

you board a plane to take you across the desert.

I will tie messages to the feet of doves,

set them to sail at dusk with a map to your country.

Dizzy with thirst they fall, raining, from the sky,

their dried meat hardening in tawny feathers.

I throw stones at planes' shadows, cursing iron

to crash, to burn in serrated-leafed cane fields.

So my skin never blisters with your desire,

in birdbaths I empty vials of avicide.

The scorpion's sting tears my veil,

the glance from your poisonous eyes.

from
Prairie Schooner

I have faith in the single glossy capsule of a butterfly egg.

I have faith in the way a wasp nest is never quiet

and never wants to be. I have faith that the pile of forty

painted turtles balanced on top of each other will not fall

as the whole messy mass makes a scrabble-run

for the creek and away from a fox's muddy paws.

I have been thinking of you on these moonless nights—

nights so full of blue fur and needle-whiskers, I don't dare

linger outside for long. I wonder if scientists could classify

us a binary star—something like Albireo, four hundred

light-years away. I love that this star is actually two—

one blue, one gold, circling each other, never touching—

a single star soldered and edged in two colors if you spy it

on a clear night in July. And if this evening, wherever you are,

brings you face-to-face with a raccoon or possum—

be careful of the teeth and all that wet bite.

During the darkest part of the night, teeth grow longer

in their mouths. And if the oleander spins you still

another way—take a turn and follow it. It will help you avoid

the spun-light sky, what singularity we might've become.

from Poem-a-Day

after Richard Rhodes

1

A man stood beside the gate

with his severed eyeball

in the palm of his hand.

The empty socket stared at me

with a shy creeping fire

or so I imagined in my pride.

So I said, “I can undo this.”

2

We watched the blast through welder's glass

and a tinted lens, from twenty miles east

in the Sierra Oscura. We slathered ourselves

with suntan lotion. Serber peeped

with a naked eye, and was blinded

for ninety seconds—when he could see again,

just chaparral and nine scrub pines.

The light had bounced off the moon
.

3

Neils Bohr recites in his soft rapt voice:
I divide myself into two persons, one of whom tries to fool the other, while a third, who is in fact the same as the other two, is filled with wonder at this confusion. Thinking becomes dramatic, and quietly acts the most complicated plots with itself and for itself; and the spectator again and again becomes an actor
.

4

The pile contains 771,002 pounds of graphite, 80,590 pounds of uranium oxide, 12,412 pounds of uranium metal, and took seventeen days to build. At 3:49 Fermi orders the control rods removed. At 3:53 he shuts the reaction down. It produced a half watt of energy, not enough to flicker a bulb, but the neutron intensity doubled every two minutes
.

5

The guard stood aside, the eye in his hand

flinched, I lowered my head,

when I crossed that threshold

I was back in childhood, a swing rocked,

a red ball bounced, the little ones

were jumping rope and chanting

the numbers, holy names

that stand for nothing except themselves.

Thorium is sequenced from that song,

radium and the transuranic elements.

Once or twice they clapped.

Then it was night, my father called me home,

by no name or voice, just darkness.

from
The Manhattan Review

There exist 54 Goldilocks planets

54 planets not too hot

54 planets not too cold

54 planets where the living

is juuuuuust right

in that particular planetary zone

54 planets like Earth

but not Earth Similar

not the same 54 planets close

but different Different

except for Prince

Assless Pants Prince

High-Heel Boots Prince

Purple Rain Prince

Paisley Park Prince

I Would Die For You
Prince

Ejaculating Guitar Prince

Jehovah's Witness Prince

Needs A New Hip Prince

Wrote
Slave
On His Face Prince

Took An Unpronounceable Symbol For His Name Prince

Chka Chka Chka Ahh
Prince

54 planets each with a Prince

and every Prince

exactly the same

as the one we know on Earth

54 lace 54 canes

54 planets 54 Prince

These 54 Prince swallow 54 worries

The 54 worries become 54 songs

54 songs made of 54 bars 54 bars

using 54 chords 54 downbeats

where they pick up the worries

54 offbeats to lay the worries down again

54 worried skank-beat Prince

birth 54 worrisome funk-drenched songs

Once an Earth year the Prince

gather around Lake Minnetonka