The Best American Poetry 2015 (18 page)

alone and twenty-three. Some weekends I drive

to KC, where a woman who won't need me

lets me stay over, though at sex I'm still a boy,

the way at writing I'm still naïve, unskilled,

fascinated by form but lazy about content.

I'd like to finally read what I've been quoting.

Rummaging after maturity, I overdo the easy

and am too timid to engage full heart.

But I work the paths that may lead from myself.

Ike stays a boy, boyishly winning the worst war.

As president little happened we praise him for,

and by
we
I mean the characters of my novel,

among the adult troubles they fall into

and I don't understand. I avoid addressing

tyranny and battlefield and Holocaust.

For years I write liner notes to real life.

All drafts of that story will leave the earth,

and I'll send gratitude to the devil of fortune,

who will let that manuscript drift

like a bad vapor through offices of agent and editor.

This summer at the Democratic Party Convention

in Chicago, where the man who gives
Leaves of Grass

away carelessly will be renominated, the delegates

keep doing the Macarena every time I look.

The vice president claims during his speech

to be doing the Macarena, but does not move,

then offers to demonstrate it again. Presidents

are always late in the day of their time.

Like dances, our political lives come and go.

It's the summer of all dances, coffee leaping

in the percolator, gravity-defiant solitude,

and through the window, houses and fields

seduced in their own passing crazes

of seasons, life and death that won't need me.

from
Fruita Pulp

The washing machine door broke. We hand-washed for a week.

Left in the tub to soak, the angers began to reek,

And sometimes when we spoke, you said we shouldn't speak.

Pandora was a bride; the gods gave her a jar

But said don't look inside. You know how stories are—

The can of worms denied? It's never been so far.

Whatever the gods forbid, it's sure someone will do.

And so Pandora did, and made the worst come true.

She peeked under the lid, and out all trouble flew:

Sickness, war, and pain, nerves frayed like fretted rope,

Every mortal bane with which Mankind must cope.

The only thing to remain, lodged in the mouth, was Hope.

Or so the tale asserts— and who am I to deny it?

Yes, out like black-winged birds the woes flew and ran riot,

But I say that the woes were words, and the only thing left was quiet.

from
The Atlantic Monthly

by the age of nine  you knew everything  tra-la

had met two Presidents  tra-la  could explain pi

memorize Shakespeare soliloquies

or checkmate anyone blind-folded  child's play

violin  oboe  harpsichord  duplicate bridge

so what  then  was left to do

cut corners  fit in  marry someone

polish silver  slap your children  or go back

back to one  tra-la  then two and so forth

'til you learn to love all that blooms in the spring

from
Denver Quarterly

after Hurricane Sandy & 3 nights of no power

In the delicatessen a last avocado.

Black, pulpy—a kind of soft grenade.

I set it down

for probably nobody.

I step out—not through doors

but through clear plastic tatters

shimmering in a doorframe.

Hothouse roses on the shelves outside;

hyacinths in foiled cups.

*

Calling storms by dumb names—

not the shabbiest way of neutering disaster,

I think.

Like the pit bull called Cuddles,

the Lover's Lane near the sewage treatment plant—

Even
All Saints' Day
,

when you think about it.

Today, when I say,
I have it good
,

meaning,
better than others
,

& the children screaming
Help

then
Made you look
, meaning

We tricked you—

*

But hyacinths in November!

You should see them!

Hyacinths make roses ridiculous by contrast.

Just look at the roses

hyperventilating in their cellophane shawls—

Pluck their cat claws & they don't object . . .

I want to grab someone passing & ask

the riddle that flowers won't answer—

how much beauty

comes from never saying no?

*

Maybe someone
will
answer me.

That's why I keep my mouth shut.

*

But not the sour-mouthed cashier—

she handles the bills,

she carelessly dabs the lemon wedge

she keeps by the side of the register.

Never a word from her.

Maybe the balances chafe

the tongue as well as the fingers.

She doesn't need to keep an eye peeled—

the cameras do it all.

If I could teach one art, it

would be how to go home unanswered,

empty-handed—

*

But what about the sidewalk Cyclops,

the all-seeing tattoo on the bald guy's head,

who once, I swear, called me by my right name,

who saw me frowning in sunlight—

That & this so bad, Tyrell, you ain't

seen the darkest yet . . .

The subway's closed tonight—

what darkest dark can he guard now?

*

I think I'd grow to like it—

the terrible wisdom

of stillness. The stomach, unchurning,

hollow as a prop.

The circles moving around them,

the cashier & the Cyclops.

The flowers too, if they can

reckon up anything besides their own mutilation.

Maybe they can sense

the babies wheeling by at warp speed . . .

who seem too light, having

little to them, or too much—an eye,

a name, some inarticulate rage,

all that's needed to be called a storm.

*

And what's a blackout, Tyrell?

Afraid of roaches?

Maybe you'll make some new friends
.

*

And why hyacinths, why November?

Why rooted, not cut through, uncovered,

combining two colors?

Celestial blue, arterial purple,

maybe earth thinking both of heaven

& the blood in the sexes—

Thinking not only of a man-boy

turned into something beautifully inhuman

because a god looked at him once

but also picturing women

who know how to hide,

the woman in the jungle camp called

Hyacinth?

76, secreting herself

under a cot while the cult leader

in the pavilion makes nine hundred others

lie on the ground one last time,

& they won't rise again,

the cups on the ground like white flowers.

The toxins, red and purple in the cups,

around the roses of their mouths.

& Hyacinth who knows how to hide,

how to wait for the last to drink

even as the writer of the last note

summons those particulars

that are terrible for being so ordinary—

a gray sky, a dog barking,

a bird on a telephone wire.

White night, the leader calls it.

Stepping over the people on the ground—

Hyacinth & the moon

can rise in the white, humid night.

*

November then;

November now.

A kind of soft grenade

I set down for probably nobody.

Would I eat the goddamn flowers

if I thought they'd answer?

Made you look is all we can say

from
The Iowa Review

like a lagoon,

like a canoe,

like you

are part earth

and part moon,

like déjà-vu,

like you

had never been

to the outer brink

or the inner Louvre,

like hay,

like air,

like your mother

just this morning

had combed a dream

into your hair,

like you

had never heard

a sermon or

a harsh word,

like a fool,

like a pearl,

like you

are new to the world.

from
The New Criterion