The Best American Poetry 2015 (15 page)

When the cherry moon smiles

they thrust under their heads

Under the water the Prince sick up

the old worries Under the water

worry sacks rise empty again

It takes a worried man
the Prince say

to sing a worried song

while beneath the surface of Lake Minnetonka

the perch in the shoals

and the gobies in their holes

nibble at the worries

our skimmed from the top worries

scraped from the bottom worries

spooned from the middle good enough worries

There's worries now
the fish sing

but there won't be worries long

from
The Awl

It's very easy to get.

Just keep living and you'll find yourself

getting more and more of it.

You can keep it or pass it on,

but it's a good idea to keep a small portion

for those nights when you're feeling so good

you forget you're human. Then drudge it up

and float down from the ceiling

that is covered with stars that glow in the dark

for the sole purpose of being beautiful for you,

and as you sink their beauty dims and goes out—

I mean it flies out the nearest door or window,

its whoosh raising the hair on your forearms.

If only your arms were green, you could have two small lawns!

But your arms are just there and you are kaput.

It's all your fault, anyway, and it always has been—

the kind word you thought of saying but didn't,

the appalling decline of human decency, global warming,

thermonuclear nightmares, your own small cowardice,

your stupid idea that you would live forever—

all
tua culpa
. John Philip Sousa

invented the sousaphone, which is also your fault.

Its notes resound like monstrous ricochets.

But when you wake up, your body

seems to fit fairly well, like a tailored suit,

and you don't look too bad in the mirror.

Hi there, feller!

Old feller, young feller, who cares?

Whoever it was who felt guilty last night,

to hell with him. That was then.

from Poem-a-Day

Strip thirty good-sized leaves.

Wash them, and pat dry.

Paint the leaves with egg white

and dredge in fine sugar.

Let stand upon a wire rack.

Buber writes, “man's final objective is this:

to become, himself, a law—a Torah.”

The granules glimmer upon the mint,

hard dew, a glittery,

sweet finish to a fine night

and a flourless chocolate cake

with a little raspberry sauce.

I know that it's my job, but Rabbi, I worry

because I like worrying,

and I admire the persistence of the mint,

really just a weed: spicy, ragged, alive.

To grow toward the sun—it's like listening—

and who doesn't need to aspire?

Yes, Rabbi, the lesson's true:

to become a law means to know God,

but who could be ready for that?

Rabbi, try the candied mint: it's heaven.

from
The Carolina Quarterly

The bar was called The Den of Iniquity,

or maybe The Cadillac Lounge—whatever

it was, its sign was a neon martini glass,

or a leg ending in stiletto. Maybe a parrot. Anyway,

in that place I danced without anyone

touching me but seven men watched

from the bar with embered, truculent eyes.

Or I danced with my boyfriend's hands

hot around my ribs. Or I didn't have a boyfriend

and no one was looking and my dance moves

were nervous, sick-eel-ish, and eventually

I just sat down. What I remember for sure

is that was the night I drank well gin

and spun myself into a terrible headache.

That was the night I thought I was pregnant

and drank only club soda. That was

the night I made a tower from Rolling Rock

bottles sometime after midnight

and management spoke to me quietly

but only after snapping a Polaroid

for the bathroom Wall of Fame. In any case,

when I finally stumbled or strode

or snuck outside, the air was Austin-thick,

Reno-dry, Montpellier-sharp. I don't remember

if my breath clouded or vanished

or dropped beneath the humidity. I don't remember

if the music pulsing from inside

was the Velvet Underground or Otis Redding

or the local band of mustached banjo men.

You know this poem has a gimmick,

and you're right. But understand: if I wrote

Cadillac Lounge, boyfriend
,
beer tower, soul

it would be suddenly true, a memory lit

by lightning flash. Who needs that sort

of confinement? If the way forward

is an unbending line, let the way back

be quicksilver, beading and re-swirling. Forgive

the trick and let me keep this mix-and-match,

this willful confusion of bars, of beaches,

of iced overpasses and hands on my hands,

all the films with gunfights, all the films

with dogs, the Kandinsky, the Rembrandt,

the moment the moon's face snapped

into focus, the moment I learned

the word
truculent
, each moment the next

and the one before, and in this blur,

oh, how many lifetimes I can have.

from
Pleiades

At the weigh-in

on the morning of March 24th, 1962, the World Welterweight Champ,

Benny “Kid” Paret,

called his challenger, Emile Griffith, a
maricón
—

Cuban slang for “faggot”—

and smiled. Emile wanted to knock the Kid out right there.

Gil Clancy, his manager,

managed to hold him back, told him to “save it for tonight.”

The New York Times

wouldn't print the correct translation, maintained that Paret had called

Emile an “unman.”

The sportswriter Howard Tuckner raved against the euphemistic

copy editors, “A butterfly

is an unman. A rock is an unman. These lunatics!”

No one would mention

the word “homosexual” in connection with a star

athlete. Another

journalist, Jimmy Breslin—Irish straight-talker—said,

“That was what Paret

was looking to do—get him steamed! If you're going to look for trouble,

you found it!”

By the twelfth round, both men had tired. They clinched, heads ear

to ear, embracing,

then punching underneath, whaling away at the other's

ribs, face. Such

intimate hostility. As if, could they have spoken to each other

through plastic mouth guards,

they would have groaned out curses, endearments, pillow talk.

At the close of the sixth round

the Kid had landed a combination, ending in a hard right

to Emile's chin.

He had gone down in his corner for an eight count,

but got back up

and started slugging as the bell rang and delivered him

from an almost certain

knockout. The crowd had shouted, whistled, roared.

In the black-and-white footage

of the TV broadcast on YouTube, the referee Ruby Goldstein breaks up

their clinch. Photographers

lean in and slide their old-fashioned flash-bulb cameras across the ring's

sweat-spattered

canvas floor to get a closer shot of the exhausted fighters. Cigarette

and cigar smoke

hangs heavy. The announcer Don Dunphy complains, “This is probably

the tamest round

of the entire fight.” One second later Emile staggers the Kid

with an overhand right.

“Griffith rocks him.” Emile lands twenty-nine punches in eighteen

seconds. “Paret against

the ropes, almost hopeless.” Emile steps back, winds up, then swings

to get his full

body weight into each punch. Eyewitness Norman Mailer, ten feet

away from the fighters,

would write that Emile's right hand was “whipping like a piston rod

which had broken through

the crankcase, or like a baseball bat demolishing a pumpkin.”

The crowd screams,

frenzied as piranhas stripping in less than half a minute the flesh

from a cow fallen

into the river. As Emile hammers the Kid's head with nine straight uppercuts

in two seconds, so it whips

back and forth in the slow-motion replay like a ragdoll's head shaken

by a girl throwing

a tantrum, one commentator observes, “That's beautiful

camera work,

isn't it?” Another responds, “Yeah, terrific.” While Emile mauls

the Kid with mechanical

precision, he may be thinking of how the Kid reached out

and tauntingly patted

his left buttock, lisping
Maricón, maricón
, as Emile stood

stripped down

to his black trunks on the scales at the weigh-in. Or he may be thinking

of his job designing ladies'

hats in the Garment District. Attach that ostrich feather to the brim

of the blue boater, left hook,

pile-driver right. Lean into the punch. Put him away. But Paret,

tangled in the ropes,

won't go down. Clancy had told him to keep punching until

the referee separated

them. Emile doesn't know that the Kid will never regain

consciousness, will die

in ten days. He doesn't know that for the rest of his life

he will have nightmares