Best American Poetry 2017 Read online

  from Denver Quarterly

  LEONARD COHEN

  * * *

  Steer Your Way

  Steer your way through the ruins of the Altar and the Mall

  Steer your way through the fables of Creation and the Fall

  Steer your way past the Palaces that rise above the rot

  Year by year

  Month by month

  Day by day

  Thought by thought

  Steer your heart past the Truth you believed in yesterday

  Such as Fundamental Goodness and the Wisdom of the Way

  Steer your heart, precious heart, past the women whom you bought

  Year by year

  Month by month

  Day by day

  Thought by thought

  Steer your path through the pain that is far more real than you

  That has smashed the Cosmic Model, that has blinded every View

  And please don’t make me go there, though there be a God or not

  Year by year

  Month by month

  Day by day

  Thought by thought

  They whisper still, the injured stones, the blunted mountains weep

  As he died to make men holy, let us die to make things cheap

  And say the Mea Culpa, which you’ve gradually forgot

  Year by year

  Month by month

  Day by day

  Thought by thought

  Steer your way, O my heart, though I have no right to ask

  To the one who was never never equal to the task

  Who knows he’s been convicted, who knows he will be shot

  Year by year

  Month by month

  Day by day

  Thought by thought

  from The New Yorker

  MICHAEL COLLIER

  * * *

  A Wild Tom Turkey

  When he’s in the yard he’s hard to find,

  not like when he stands in the stubble

  across the road brewing his voice

  with deeper and deeper percolations

  of what sounds like, “I’ll fuck anything

  in feathers,” stopping now and then

  to display his fan and perform a wobbly

  polka, chest heavy as he breasts forward

  but never closing on the hens who stay

  in wary steps ahead conversing only

  with themselves, their spindly heads foraging,

  measuring the distance that frustrates

  his occasional flustering leaps so that

  when they reach the street, their scurry

  provokes him to fly, as if he’s both

  bull and matador, charging and turning

  in the air but landing in a bounding

  rolling heap as the whole rafter

  of them disappears into the grass—

  where after much silence, after the sun

  rises and sets and rises, after commandments

  come down from mountains, after armistices

  and treaties are written, what happens

  unseen in the grass still sounds like murder.

  from Ploughshares

  BILLY COLLINS

  * * *

  The Present

  Much has been said about being in the present.

  It’s the place to be, according to the gurus,

  like the latest club on the downtown scene,

  but no one, it seems, is able to give you directions.

  It doesn’t seem desirable or even possible

  to wake up every morning and begin

  leaping from one second into the next

  until you fall exhausted back into bed.

  Plus, there’d be no past,

  so many scenes to savor and regret,

  and no future, the place you will die

  but not before flying around with a jet-pack.

  The trouble with the present is

  that it’s always in a state of vanishing.

  Take the second it takes to end

  this sentence with a period—already gone.

  What about the moment that exists

  between banging your thumb

  with a hammer and realizing

  you are in a whole lot of pain?

  What about the one that occurs

  after you hear the punch line

  but before you get the joke?

  Is that where the wise men want us to live

  in that intervening tick, the tiny slot

  that occurs after you have spent hours

  searching downtown for that new club

  and just before you give up and head back home?

  from New Ohio Review

  CARL DENNIS

  * * *

  Two Lives

  In my other life the B-l7 my father is piloting

  Is shot down over Normandy

  And my mother raises her sons alone

  On her widow’s pension and on what she earns

  As a nurse at the local hospital, a sum

  That pays for a third-floor walk-up

  In a neighborhood that’s seen better days.

  I play stick ball after school in the lot

  Behind the laundry. I come home bruised

  From fist fights and snowball fights

  With boys who live in the tenement on the corner.

  Not once do I play with the boy I am

  In this life, whose father, too old for the draft,

  Starts a paint company in a rented basement

  Which almost goes under after a year

  And then is saved, as the war continues,

  By a steady flow of government contracts

  That allows my mother to retire from nursing

  And devote herself to work with the poor.

  I find our quiet neighborhood of handsome houses

  And shady streets crushingly uneventful.

  No surprise I spend hours each day turning the pages

  Of stories about trolls, wizards, giants,

  Wandering knights, and captive princesses.

  In my other life, I have to leave high school

  To bolster the family income as lab boy

  In the building attached to the factory that in this life

  My father owns. I clean test tubes and beakers,

  With a break for stacking cans on the loading dock

  Or driving the truck to make deliveries.

  In this life it takes only one summer

  Of work at the office, addressing announcements

  Of a coating tougher than any made by competitors,

  To decide that the real world, so called,

  Is overrated, compared to the world of novels,

  Where every incident is freighted with implications

  For distinguishing apparent success from actual.

  No wonder I’m leaning toward a profession

  Where people can earn a living by talking

  In class about books they love. Meanwhile,

  In my other life, after helping to bring the union

  To a non-union shop, I rise in the ranks

  To become shop steward, and then,

  Helped by a union scholarship,

  I earn a degree in labor law.

  I bring home casebooks on weekends

  To the very block where I happen to live

  Ensconced in this life, here in a gray-green house

  With dark-brown trim. If I don’t answer the bell

  On weekends in summer, I’m in the garden,

  Strolling the shady path beneath the maples,

  Musing on the difference between a life

  Deficient in incident and a life uncluttered.

  Seated at my patio table, I write a letter

  Asking a friend what book has he read

  In the last few months that has opened his eyes

  On a subject that’s likely to interest me.

  Meanwhile, across the street, in the gardenr />
  Of my other life, I can often be found

  Hoeing the rutabaga and beans and cabbage

  I plan to share with neighbors in the hope they’re moved

  To consider planting a garden where many

  May do the weeding together, and the watering.

  It won’t be long till I knock at the door of the house

  Where in this life I’m at my desk preparing a class

  On solitude in the novels of the Romantics.

  Do I say to myself it’s one more stranger

  Eager to sell me something or make a convert,

  Or do I go down to see who’s there?

  from The New Yorker

  CLAUDIA EMERSON

  * * *

  Spontaneous Remission

  In the rare example, it disappears

    in the aftermath—

     or in the midst—

  who can tell,

    of a fever, extreme,

     unrelated to the cancer:

  a girl’s leukemia gone

    when she awakes

     from smallpox, a woman’s

  tumor dissolved

    in her breast after

     heat consumes her for

  two full days. Perhaps

    such remission is the result

     of the rude surprise

  of the archaic, derelict

    malady, most fevers made,

     now, obsolete—polio,

  rubella, influenza,

    things of the past,

     of vial and syringe.

  And so, why not,

    I consider how

     I might engender it,

  immunized

    as I have been against

     all but what has

  taken this hold

    in me. Idiopathic

     it must be, then,

  something fiendishly

    mine, inwrought,

     unknown to it.

  I could bury

    myself in a pit

     I will make of coals

  and ash the way

    my father banked a fire;

     I could enshroud

  myself in a scald

    of steam; I could inject

     myself with malaria,

  an unnamed jungle’s

    hot restlessness—

     somehow make

  the velocity of heat

    so intense and decided

     that I become clear

  and radiant, my scalp,

    my skull a nimbus,

     like a dandelion’s filling out

  with its crazed halo

    of seed, what I

     was taught when small

  to blow out

    like a flame, the remaining

     seed slim pins

  my mother told me

    to tell as time.

     And when I wake

  as from the childhood

    bed, it will have

     broken, all of it,

  the veil of seeded

    water on my brow

     a sign there: something

  atomized, cast

    out, now, blown away,

     by the arson that has

  become the God in me.

  from The Southern Review

  DAVID FEINSTEIN

  * * *

  Kaddish

  Strapped into black

  there is only one theme song

  on earth tonight.

  Giant death machine,

  play it for me.

  Of all the silent killers

  none is weaker than my smile

  after a tasteless joke,

  something I would never have said

  in your company. According to my people

  there is no heaven or hell

  only earth and memory,

  the normal hunger

  that hits this time of night

  trying to picture you

  walking back to us

  across the strip mall parking lot of this century.

  My brother and I, still buckled in,

  slurping grape soda

  as the same war crawls across the radio.

  There are bodies and to see them

  is to know they are yours

  to forget, to know there’s nothing

  that won’t be forgotten.

  On the dark windshield

  I use my finger to write your name,

  I watch the world move through it.

  from jubilat

  CAROLYN FORCHÉ

  * * *

  The Boatman

  We were thirty-one souls all, he said, on the gray-sick of sea

  in a cold rubber boat, rising and falling in our filth.

  By morning this didn’t matter, no land was in sight,

  all were soaked to the bone, living and dead.

  We could still float, we said, from war to war.

  What lay behind us but ruins of stone piled on ruins of stone?

  City called “mother of the poor” surrounded by fields

  of cotton and millet, city of jewelers and cloak-makers,

  with the oldest church in Christendom and the Sword of Allah.

  If anyone remains there now, he assures, they would be utterly alone.

  There is a hotel named for it in Rome two hundred meters

  from the Piazza di Spagna, where you can have breakfast under

  the portraits of film stars. There the staff cannot do enough for you.

  But I am talking nonsense again, as I have since that night

  we fetched a child, not ours, from the sea, drifting face-

  down in a life vest, its eyes taken by fish or the birds above us.

  After that, Aleppo went up in smoke, and Raqqa came under a rain

  of leaflets warning everyone to go. Leave, yes, but go where?

  We lived through the Americans and Russians, through Americans

  again, many nights of death from the clouds, mornings surprised

  to be waking from the sleep of death, still unburied and alive

  but with no safe place. Leave, yes, we obey the leaflets, but go where?

  To the sea to be eaten, to the shores of Europe to be caged?

  To camp misery and camp remain here. I ask you then, where?

  You tell me you are a poet. If so, our destination is the same.

  I find myself now the boatman, driving a taxi at the end of the world.

  I will see that you arrive safely, my friend, I will get you there.

  from Poetry

  VIEVEE FRANCIS

  * * *

  Given to These Proclivities, By God

  . . . bound by sin’s galling fetters

  —hymn

  And like every sinner, I prayed,

  “Take this sin from me” but

  the sin was mine, and how to take it

  and not call it stealing? And why

  place my sin upon another? So

  I ate my sin. Like any good sinner

  I have an appetite. I could eat as much

  as I drink. And you know how much

  I like a neat Mark. I don’t think twice.

     I swallow it down.

     Two fingers, no water.

  Once, then once more. So it burns?

     What won’t?

  Like any dirty girl, I went down

  to the river to wash it all away.

  To be made clean. But

     the river threw me up,

     water wouldn’t have me,

  back onto the trail left to my trials.

  And sin reigned down upon me

  like those hot rays of sun that penetrate

  th
e leaf. Like the feathers of a blackbird

  come down like rage. “O God,” I cried,

     “Lay me down in a cool bed

     of rhododendrons”

  and “Let them cover my naked ambition”

  but like all sinners I don’t get what I want, so

  I want it all the more, the petals’ sweet droop

  like lips, their generous spill over the verge,

  the shade below where I might be safe

  from the light that did not love me enough,

     not really.

  All sinners know that. We stumble

  enough to know: not everyone rises again.

  from Cherry Tree

  AMY GERSTLER

  * * *

  Dead Butterfly

  dead empress of winged things

  weightless flake of flight

  you rest in state on my desk

  more delicate and flatter than

  this scrap of foolscap you lie on

  flatter even than my dad’s voice

  when he was mad  like death

  anger drained him of color

  but his temper was gentle

  flare-ups were rare

  and of course nonexistent now

  since he was found

  lifeless in bed  a cut on his head

  how did he make it down the hall

  after he fell do you think? homing instinct?

  the undersides of your wings

  have elongated spots

  silver iridescences whose shapes

  vary like globs of oil floating on water

  your three visible legs

  are tiny whiskers slightly curved