The Best American Poetry 2013 Read online

  The strawberries are not yet fully ripe—it is the cusp of the season—yet the field has been picked over;

  we have come too early and too late.

  Lush, parsley-green, the plants spread their low stalks to flower like primitive daisies and I seek the telltale flash of red as I bend to part the dust-inoculated leaves, spooking the lazy honeybees, but mostly there is nothing, the berries are pale, fuzzed nubs. Of the rest what’s left are the morbidly pale, overripe, fly-ridden berries belted into purple froth and those just at the bursting brink of rot—in the morning, if you bring them home,

  these will wear a blue-green fur, becoming themselves small farms,

  enterprising propagators of mold.

  But here’s one perfect, heart-shaped berry, and half a row later, three more, in the shadows, overlooked. Where has my family gone? Where is everybody? I find myself abandoned in the fields, illuminated by shafts of sunlight through lavender clouds, bodiless, unmoored and entirely happy.

  —

  White eggplant and yellow peppers—

  colored lanterns of the Emperor!

  Lobular, chalk-red, weevil-scarred tomatoes—

  a dozen errant moons of Neptune!

  Vidalia onions seized by their hair and lifted

  To free a friendly giantess from the soil!

  Snapdragons!

  They carry the intonation of Paris

  on a rainy day in May, granitic odor of pears,

  consensus of slate and watered silk.

  Elizabeth snips a dozen stems

  with flower shears

  scented by stalks of sage,

  rosemary, flowering basil, mint.

  —

  From here the city is everything to the east, endlessly ramified tile-roofed subdivisions of houses and garden apartments, strip malls, highway interchanges, intransigent farmers holding their patchwork dirt together with melons and leaf lettuce—the very next field has been harrowed and scoured and posted for sale—already in our years here it has come this far, a tidal wave of human habitation, a monocultural bumper crop. And to the west is the Everglades, reduced and denuded but secure, for the historical moment, buggered and cosseted, left hand protecting what the right seeks to destroy. And where they meet: this fertile border zone, contested marginland inhabited by those seeking refuge from the law or the sprawl or the iron custody of the market, those who would cross over in search of freedom, or shelter, or belief, those who would buy into this world and those who would be rid of it alike in their admiration and hope for and distrust of what they see. And what they see is this: Krome Avenue. What they see is the Historical Moment caged in formidable automobiles gorging on fast food, definitive commodities of the previous century to be supplanted by what? The next Historical Moment, and the next, like a plague of locusts descending upon the fields, or the fields descended upon, or these fields, now, just as they are.

  —

  This may be the end of it, I suspect, the last year we make this effort. The kids are getting older and less pliable, the alligators in the irrigation canals pushed ever farther west, carrying into the heart of the sawgrass the reflection of a world grown monstrous and profound. If so, I will miss the scratched hands and the cucumber vines, ranks of hibiscus focusing their radar on the sun, the taste of stolen strawberries eaten in the rows, chalky and unwashed, no matter their senselessness here, in fields reclaimed from subtropical swamp, these last remaining acres empty or picked over or blossoming or yet to blossom, again fruit, again spoilage, again heavy pollen dust.

  No, the Third World does not begin at Krome Avenue, because there is only

  one world—.

  It’s late. Cars are pulling out, mobile homes kicking up gravel, a ringing in my ears as of caravans crossing the Sahara resolves to Elizabeth calling on the cell phone—hey, where are you? I can see her by the farm stand, searching the plots and rows, not seeing me, still drifting, afloat, not yet ready to be summoned back. It’s time to go—where have you been?

  Where have I been, can I say for certain?

  Where have I been?

  But I know where I am—I’m here, in the strawberry field.

  Here.

  I’m right here.

  from PEN America

  JESSE MILLNER

  In Praise of Small Gods

  I’m all for leaving this world,

  entering that bright space

  of becoming like dewdrops

  on the morning buttercups

  I planted last week before all the rain came.

  Already they bloom yellow with

  first light—6:30 a.m., that

  magic time when the palms

  and pines emerge from the darkness,

  when light clings to the edges

  of bougainvillea and philodendron,

  when the marsh rabbit fights

  with the hungry ravens for fallen

  seeds from the bird feeder.

  I remember the colors

  of last night’s river,

  the minor Mississippi

  that flowed through my dreams,

  how I bent down toward the current,

  pulled tiny, glimmering fish

  from the branch shadows.

  And this morning I awoke at dawn

  and knew the time by the texture

  of that early light—still, gray,

  but gathering meaning.

  And then, a cup of coffee

  on the back porch, stars still

  spinning in the heavens, moisture

  gleaming across the yard

  like a fallen constellation.

  I breathe in

  these small gods, these

  scents and ghosts and shadows

  that rise in early morning,

  and I swear I see Eden

  burning just behind

  the wall of palm

  that shields us from the drainage

  ditch, where a million mosquitoes

  buzz like tiny angels.

  I praise this morning.

  I praise drainage ditch and mosquitoes,

  I praise the tiny insect stings,

  which argue for my own life,

  yes, with each bite

  my flesh tingles with meaning,

  and with each brightening

  moment, the world around me

  comes into greater focus,

  until it is finally Florida, a feast

  of flowers and bugs and light,

  and I feel as if

  I will linger forever in the bright

  fields of this moment, that the dog’s

  soft fur against my foot

  argues for life

  more than any priest,

  more than any religion,

  more than any supernatural

  explaining of this sputtering, beautiful world

  fired with the tangible meaning of root, stem, petal,

  bone, feather, beak.

  from Gulfshore Life

  D. NURKSE

  Psalm to Be Read with Closed Eyes

  Ignorance will carry me through the last days,

  the blistering cities, over briny rivers

  swarming with jellyfish, as once my father

  carried me from the car up the tacked carpet

  to the white bed, and if I woke, I never knew it.

  from Poetry

  ED OCHESTER

  New Year

  after calling our son & daughter

  to wish them happy & good luck

  we get to bed early but get

  a phone call from my mother

  who died in April she doesn’t

  say where she’s calling from though

  I can hear laughter in the background

  and she says Uncle Frank is making

  his famous Manhattans which are

  she adds gratuitously as always

  a lot better than I was ever able to make—

  “one of his really puts you to
sleep”—

  and I have to reply “Mom do you know

  that you never once so far as I can

  remember have told me ‘I love you’ ”

  and she says rather sadly

  “You’ve always been somewhat of

  a fool; don’t you remember how,

  that time you passed out at my birthday party

  one of your cousins told you later

  I cried out ‘My son, my only son!’?”

  from The American Poetry Review

  PAISLEY REKDAL

  Birthday Poem

  It is important to remember that you will die,

  lifting the fork with the sheep’s brain

  lovingly speared on it to the mouth, the little

  piece smooth on the one side as a baby

  mouse pickled in wine; on the other, blood-

  plush and intestinal atop

  its bed of lentils. The lentils

  were once picked over for stones

  in the fields of India perhaps, the sun

  shining into tractor blades slow-moving

  as the swimmer’s arms that now pierce,

  then rise, then pierce again the cold

  water of the river outside your window called

  The Heart or The Breast, even, but meaning

  something more than this, beyond

  the crudeness of flesh; though what

  is crude about flesh anyway,

  watching yourself every day lose

  another bit of luster?

  It is wrong to say one kind of beauty

  replaces another. Isn’t it your heart

  along with its breast muscles that

  has started to weaken; solace

  isn’t possible for every loss, or why else

  should we clutch, stroke, gasp, love

  the little powers we once

  were born with? Perhaps the worst thing

  in the world would be to live forever.

  Otherwise what would be the point

  of memory, without which

  we would have nothing to hurt

  or placate ourselves with later?

  Look. It is only getting worse

  from here on out. Thank God. Otherwise

  the sun on this filthy river

  could never be as boring or as poignant,

  the sheep’s brain trembling on the fork

  wouldn’t seem once stung

  by the tang of grass, by the call

  of some body distant and beloved to it

  singing through the milk. The fork

  would be only a fork, and not the cool

  heft of it between your fingers, the scratch

  of lemon in the lentils, onion, parsley

  slick with blood; food that,

  even as you lift it to your mouth,

  you’d never thought you’d eat, and do.

  from New England Review

  ADRIENNE RICH

  Endpapers

  I

  If the road’s a frayed ribbon strung through dunes

  continually drifting over

  if the night grew green as sun and moon

  changed faces and the sea became

  its own unlit unlikely sound

  consider yourself lucky to have come

  this far Consider yourself

  a trombone blowing unheard

  tones a bass string plucked or locked

  down by a hand its face articulated

  in shadow, pressed against

  a chain-link fence Consider yourself

  inside or outside, where-

  ever you were when knotted steel

  stopped you short You can’t flow through

  as music or

  as air

  II

  What holds what binds is breath is

  primal vision in a cloud’s eye

  is gauze around a wounded head

  is bearing a downed comrade out beyond

  the numerology of vital signs

  into predictless space

  III

  The signature to a life requires

  the search for a method

  rejection of posturing

  trust in the witnesses

  a vial of invisible ink

  a sheet of paper held steady

  after the end-stroke

  above a deciphering flame

  from Granta

  ANNE MARIE ROONEY

  Lake Sonnet

  It was July. It was my birthday. I

  was still drinking then. I went with the men

  to a lake with no clothing on. The men

  who for a year I’d loved hardly and I

  walked to the water. All that love hurt my I-

  can’t-say-what. My hands knew nothing but men

  that year. In snow I stand out. Every man

  I’ve ever seen has seen me back. My eyes

  sweat from it. Though from there the summer breaks

  off, it felt sharp and bright through that last hour,

  like glass fired to gold before it breaks

  against its own heat. It’s soft and then it breaks,

  and, seeing itself, shifts light. For our

  trouble, we were cold and wet for an hour.

  from Subtropics

  J. ALLYN ROSSER

  Intro to Happiness

  They were dressed in distressed denim,

  legs crossed and notebooks open.

  I wished I didn’t have to explain

  how difficult the course would be,

  but I soldiered through the syllabus

  assigning seventy chapters on sighing,

  thirty-three articles concerning slings,

  forty-nine on arrows,

  countless miserable passages

  they would be obliged to internalize

  to get to, and appreciate, the happy ones.

  To a hand raised in the back

  I explained why joy—post-pubescent joy—

  was reserved for more advanced classes.

  To avoid any further confusion

  I laid out the irrelevance of carnal thrills

  and blisses originating in ignorance—

  acknowledging the latter represents

  the layperson’s misconstruction of happiness.

  Next I dwelt conscientiously on how

  familiar the lectures would begin to sound,

  on the study groups that would dissolve

  in tears, lamentation, or dispirited gazing at walls.

  I was just getting down to the nuts

  and bolts of quizzes on terms

  they’d be using the rest of their lives,

  plus oral presentations on the three Ds

  (depression, despair, and ’ddiction)

  that would prepare them for therapy,

  when it became necessary for me to pretend

  I didn’t notice as one by one they slunk

  with downcast eyes out the double doors.

  I tried not to show how relieved . . .

  in truth the word is tickled . . .

  no, how absolutely giddy I felt

  to be facing only three scattered rows,

  then one, then just a few knee-jiggling

  pen-tappers, then finally the one student

  who probably hadn’t heard a word

  the whole time, dreaming out the window

  or picking at the fabric on her knee,

  when at last she glanced up, looked

  around, and gathered her things.

  “Be seeing you,” I said, perhaps too cheerily

  since it only hastened her departure;

  but I felt so lighthearted

  I could scarcely keep my feet on the floor.

  I wanted to strip down and dance

  around that immovable podium

  so dark and so heavy, piled high

  with what I could never pass on

  without bearing it again, all of it

  al
l over again, myself.

  from The Georgia Review

  MARY RUEFLE

  Little Golf Pencil

  At headquarters they asked me for something dry and understated. Mary, they said, it’s called a statement. They took me out back to a courtyard where they always ate lunch and showed me a little tree that was, sadly, dying. Something with four legs had eaten it rather badly. Don’t overemote, they said. I promised I wouldn’t, but I was thinking to myself that the something-with-four-legs had certainly overemoted and that the tree, in response, was overemoting now, being in the strange little position of dying. All the cops were sitting around eating sandwich halves, and they offered me one. This one’s delicious, said a lieutenant, my wife made it. Seeing as it was peanut butter and jelly I thought he was overemoting, but I didn’t say anything. I just sat looking at the tree and eating my sandwich half. When I was ready I asked for a pencil and they gave me one of those little golf pencils. I didn’t say anything about that either. I just wrote my statement and handed it over—it was a description of the tree, which they intended to give to their captain as a Christmas present—I mean my description—because the captain, well, he loved that tree and he loved my writing and every one of the cops hoped to be promoted in the captain’s heart and, who knows, maybe get a raise. Still, after all that sitting around in the courtyard eating sandwich halves, I had a nice feeling of sharing, so when they asked me if I had anything else to say I told them that in the beginning you understand the world but not yourself, and when you finally understand yourself you no longer understand the world. They seemed satisfied with that. Cops, they’re all so young.

  from Ecotone and Harper’s

  MAUREEN SEATON

  Chelsea/Suicide

  for Joe

  In every myth there’s a secret. Like the time I was looking for my childhood around the next bend after Newark and missed it, or the time teeth were discovered in my favorite uncle’s yard and he disclaimed ownership and sang falsettos.

  I went to a meeting on 28th Street. The guy next to me had eyes exactly like yours, corpuscles hardening inside blue irises. He stood too close when he told me I would die if I didn’t ease up on myself. I thought he was right but I wanted him to step back so I didn’t have to see inside his liver, which was sodden, like mine, and dark with tinges of red, white, and rosé.