The Best American Poetry 2013 Page 6

  trying to understand my motive to enlighten

  by desecration.

  In one of its enormous feet, I imagine a gift shop

  where tourists can buy replicas

  of Responsibility for themselves and friends

  they think might need it. And I’d want

  bumper stickers selling for almost nothing:

  Less talk of conscience, more of consciousness.

  I can see my friend, the ex–altar boy,

  for so long injured by memory, writing

  near the statue’s eyes, See everything;

  overlook a great deal; correct a little—

  then scratching jagged lines through

  that wisdom of Pope John Paul II,

  clearly now irresponsible. And yet his words

  remain ones I’d like to live by.

  How to defend that? How to decide?

  from The Georgia Review

  DAISY FRIED

  This Need Not Be a Comment on Death

  There’s my three-year-old mom c. 1942 in the flickery movie digitized to video: Slippery blond hair, you can tell from the light of it though the film’s black and white, squiggling the little chunk of her in her tank suit, sand drizzling from her knees, her own handsome mom, dead of cancer 1949, co-author of “Direct Observation as a Research Method” and “Children and War,” smiling on a dock. This need not be a comment on death because after all my mother puts her fingers

  through my hair when I’m in labor. Contractions are jagged spikes on the monitor screen: The nurse turned the Pitocin up. My daughter’s heart zigzags its own hectic graph, a cartoon mountain range scribbled in quick. “Your hair’s always full of knots,” my mother says. Never a caress without a complaint. Dry air of grimly clean birth suite saps my mind, skin. Needs more joy, I think, quite cold, but don’t feel pain when “fuck my hair,” I say, and my mother, a plotline, leaves to wait at the B&B for news of her granddaughter. If she never said it? If I imagined it? If she was being kind? You’ll want to remember every minute of your birth story, and every birth story’s a great one, the midwife said. After thirty hours labor even the epidural can’t keep me awake, even hanging on the squat bar with the extent of my upper body strength. A plotline, I stop trying to push my daughter fully, completely, desperately out, and she’s born. Here’s the refrigerator I dragged from the wall to see what’s buzzing: A tiny toy robot bug crawled back there when my rarely crying daughter set it, legs churning, on the floor. And here am I, plotline who gave birth to her, hauling fridge desperately backward by edges. “Happy tears!” she shouts, angrily smearing with slashing curve of arm the bumpy mound of her face. “I’m stoic!” A word I taught her by accident when “she’s stoic,” I told my husband the first time she fell

  from the high slide and refused to cry. “Stoic” crawled its legs and body into the refrigerator of her brain and stuck. My arms as far around the fridge as they’ll go: I pull, pant, I groan, leave squalid grease tracks on our gouged linoleum. The plug extracts itself from the socket, rebounds clanging the coil; the bug driving its blind head forward won’t squiggle free. “It has to run down and get quiet that way.” I crouch to wipe my stoic’s face with my sweat-wet sweatshirt, her fingers in my hair, she bites at it, flops back on linoleum. “It’s talking and dead,” she says, fascinated. Me exasperated. “I’ll buy you a new one.” Here’s the debacle. I can’t push the fridge back. It sits, an abandoned barracks in the pale field of the kitchen. A sigh, trickle, a cracking sound. “Why does everything die?” Her anger. “Why do I have to die.” A spike of outrage as faint buzzing not all that furious under the refrigerator fails to finish, as, like a glacier calving, freezer ice falls free.

  The poem’s narrow shape actually resembles an icebox . . .

  Camille Paglia on William Carlos Williams’s “This Is Just to Say”

  from The American Poetry Review

  AMY GERSTLER

  Womanishness

  The dissonance of women. The shrill frilly silly

  drippy prissy pouty fuss of us. And all the while science

  was the music of our minds. We fretted about god’s

  difficulties with intimacy as we polished our breastplates,

  darned our nighties, sprawled on front porches

  waiting for the locksmith to come and change the locks.

  Our ambitions glittered like tinsel. Our minds grabbed at

  whatever rushed by, like sea anemones at high tide.

  Hush, hush my love. All these things happened

  a long time ago. You needn’t be afraid of them now.

  from Court Green

  LOUISE GLÜCK

  Afterword

  Reading what I have just written, I now believe

  I stopped precipitously, so that my story seems to have been

  slightly distorted, ending, as it did, not abruptly

  but in a kind of artificial mist of the sort

  sprayed onto stages to allow for difficult set changes.

  Why did I stop? Did some instinct

  discern a shape, the artist in me

  intervening to stop traffic, as it were?

  A shape. Or fate, as the poets say,

  intuited in those few long ago hours—

  I must have thought so once.

  And yet I dislike the term

  which seems to me a crutch, a phase,

  the adolescence of the mind, perhaps—

  Still, it was a term I used myself,

  frequently to explain my failures.

  Fate, destiny, whose designs and warnings

  now seem to me simply

  local symmetries, metonymic

  baubles within immense confusion—

  Chaos was what I saw.

  My brush froze—I could not paint it.

  Darkness, silence: that was the feeling.

  What did we call it then?

  A “crisis of vision” corresponding, I believed,

  to the tree that confronted my parents,

  but whereas they were forced

  forward into the obstacle,

  I retreated or fled—

  Mist covered the stage (my life).

  Characters came and went, costumes were changed,

  my brush hand moved side to side

  far from the canvas,

  side to side, like a windshield wiper.

  Surely this was the desert, the dark night.

  (In reality, a crowded street in London,

  the tourists waving their colored maps.)

  One speaks a word: I.

  Out of this stream

  the great forms—

  I took a deep breath. And it came to me

  the person who drew that breath

  was not the person in my story, his childish hand

  confidently wielding the crayon—

  Had I been that person? A child but also

  an explorer to whom the path is suddenly clear, for whom

  the vegetation parts—

  And beyond, no longer screened from view, that exalted

  solitude Kant perhaps experienced

  on his way to the bridges—

  (We share a birthday.)

  Outside, the festive streets

  were strung, in late January, with exhausted Christmas lights.

  A woman leaned against her lover’s shoulder

  singing Jacques Brel in her thin soprano—

  Bravo! the door is shut.

  Now nothing escapes, nothing enters—

  I hadn’t moved. I felt the desert

  stretching ahead, stretching (it now seems)

  on all sides, shifting as I speak,

  so that I was constantly

  face to face with blankness, that

  stepchild of the sublime,

  which, it turns out,

  has been both my subject and my medium.

  What would my twin have said, had my thoughts

  reached him?

  Perhaps
he would have said

  in my case there was no obstacle (for the sake of argument)

  after which I would have been

  referred to religion, the cemetery where

  questions of faith are answered.

  The mist had cleared. The empty canvases

  were turned inward against the wall.

  The little cat is dead (so the song went).

  Shall I be raised from death, the spirit asks.

  And the sun says yes.

  And the desert answers

  your voice is sand scattered in wind.

  from Poetry

  BECKIAN FRITZ GOLDBERG

  Henry’s Song

  for Nancy and Bill

  Sometimes sitting in a friend’s backyard on a fall evening

  a thing comes to you. But then you second-guess yourself.

  You second-guess yourself, and your grace is gone.

  The cat dish is there by the step, overturned in the dry leaves,

  the trees here taller than any trees in your dreams. You’re afraid

  if you stay here they might talk. And these nights

  you only want to hear someone say, Yes,

  I think of these things, too . . . Nine o’clock, cold,

  I couldn’t see the stars for the trees, only the yellow light

  of the back window doubled over on the ground. In it,

  leaves laid with the kitchen. Then a figure passed:

  My friend reaching up into the cupboard and looking lost

  a little while. His wife bringing in a cup and dish. Both of them

  standing by the sink talking maybe about buying apples tomorrow

  or what movie or the jacket no one can find. Her hair

  was still damp from the shower and haloed in the kitchen light

  as he crossed into the next room blue with the blink of the TV.

  That afternoon my friend had thought his cat was lost and we

  searched for an hour but the cat had sunk into a deep pile of leaves,

  lay half-covered and asleep. The cat who was not lost was named

  Henry and he was dead a few weeks later of old age. At night

  he’d come in the room where I slept, and sit

  staring down at the heating vent and, hours later, if I rose to pee,

  he’d still be there as if waiting for something specific to rise

  through the floor. But life inside the house that night was golden,

  though then the kitchen was lonely, the cereal boxes misaligned

  on the shelf, a nest of white bowls, mugs upside down in a row.

  I thought someone will be left to open the cupboards after

  we are dead and there see everything has stayed the way

  we left it. Say yes, you think of these things, too. And that’s

  when the thing that came to me came to me and when I

  second-guessed myself I lost what the thing was. Sometime

  it might return, but for now I’ll say it was nothing. It was nothing.

  Inside the house someone was asking, Did you take Avantix

  and suffer heart failure? Do you live alone? Are you tired of carpet stains?

  Do you need a loan fast? Yes. And yes and yes and yes.

  I’ve thought of these things, too—standing at the window while skeletons

  on TV marched toward a cartoon cowboy. It was even stranger

  in the silence of early November, away from home. But life was gorgeous

  in the house. The glazed red sugar bowl gleamed. Months

  later, my friend told me sometimes he’d still mistake

  the shadow, the wool scarf bunched on the chair, and think

  it’s Henry. As if the mind believed absence is a trick. For it

  can still see everything. But the world asks, Do you have crow’s-feet?

  Do you have enough to cover your funeral costs? Ever feel irregular?

  Do you have trouble sleeping? That night the wind blowing

  dead leaves sounded like a distant ocean, my fingertips

  numbed with cold & the lit window held everything sacred

  in its church. I saw that light the next day slanting as we walked

  through an apple orchard and stopped at the mill for cider.

  Farther on, we came to a large pond where pike and recluse sturgeon

  lurked beneath the surface. On the bridge was a machine you’d put

  a quarter in for a handful of food for the fish. I watched my friend

  toss some in the water and the pond became alive with thrashing

  bodies, the surface almost writhing with their gleams, the sound

  of water laughing all around, and then they disappeared again,

  the water like a shadow, deep, blue-green. And quiet. There was

  a small breeze, an open field, a white clapboard building

  on one side. Things are simple, that’s what we forget.

  When I slept that night I left the door ajar for Henry

  who would come upstairs late for his vigil, the warm air

  floating above the vent from some underworld

  benevolent beyond his dreams. And when I woke later in the dark

  as sometimes you do in a strange bed away from home

  in a strange town with a moon and trees, I could feel he was there

  long before I could distinguish his shape, before I could remember

  exactly where I was. It came to me this loneliness is something we take

  with us anywhere and not that we aren’t loved, but that we aren’t

  loved forever. Life demands much less. The fish is purely

  fish and that’s enough. An apple wholly apple. Maybe it’s enough

  to be human, leave the door open, wait for a soul—which, if it comes, comes

  like the half of the conversation we imagined because we

  can’t imagine that speaking is only speaking, even to the night,

  the way we can’t believe death is only death, the way we can’t

  stand outside a window on a fall evening in a pile of leaves in Kalamazoo

  and not count ourselves among the missing. Are you single and looking

  for your soul mate? Are you drowning in credit card debt?

  Do you want more hair? Do you have trouble sleeping? Yes,

  I have trouble sleeping. But, when it was my turn, I cupped my hand

  and the machine filled it with food for the fish I scattered

  over the water and they came like the rush of fat rain up

  from the deep, glittering, swarming over nothing. It made me happy.

  Then the green silence closing over them again. The little cat

  waiting faithfully in the dark for his death and not complaining.

  And us, knowing it is already a world without us, already a pond,

  a cat, an orchard stuck with swords of light—

  but the heart needs no reason for the belovéd.

  from Plume

  TERRANCE HAYES

  New Jersey Poem

  after Willie Cole’s Malcolm’s Chicken I

  One of the many Willies I know wants me to know

  there are still bits of hopefulness being made

  in certain quarters of New Jersey. It’s happening

  elsewhere too, obviously, this Willie would say,

  but have you seen the pants sagging like the skin

  on a famished elephant and the glassy stupor

  of counselors in the consultation rooms, the trash

  bins of vendettas and prescriptions, have you seen

  the riot gear, what beyond hope could be a weapon

  against all that? The summer I drove six hours and

  some change to Willie’s place I found him building

  a huge chicken out of brooms, wax, marbles (for eyes),

  Styrofoam, and hundreds of matchsticks, but what

  I remember is the vague sorrow creasing his face.

  Like it wasn’t a
chicken at all at hand, like he’d never

  even seen a chicken in New Jersey, or a feather

  or drumstick—which I know to be untrue. A man can be

  so overwhelmed it becomes a mode of being,

  a flavor indistinguishable from spit. He hadn’t done shit

  with the letters and poems his wife left behind

  when she killed herself. I think she was running,

  I think she was being chased. She is almost floating

  below ground now. The grave is filled with floodwater,

  the roots of trees men planted after destroying the trees

  shoot through her hips. Nowadays when I want saltwater

  taffy or some of those flimsy plastic hooks good for hanging

  almost nothing, I do not go to New Jersey. And I’m sure

  no one there misses me with all the afflictions they have

  to attend. Grief will boil your eyeballs if you let it.

  It is possible to figure too much, to look too much,

  to be too verbal, so pigheaded nothing gets done.

  In those days, that particular Willie denied he was

  ever lonely in New Jersey. His head, he said, was flushed

  with snowfall, a blacksmith’s hand-crafted tools,

  and a button that, pressed the right way, played a song,

  a kind of chain gang doo-wop. To which I said Bullshit.

  Willie, that’s bullshit, you stink like a heartbroken man.

  I wanted to ask if he’d read the letters his wife left.

  Somehow we made it from Atlantic City to the VFW bar

  in Trenton without losing ourselves. I drove us through

  a pre-storm breeze and a sickish streetlamp twilight

  until there was rain on the windshield and voices

  dispensing threefold news of what might happen,

  what does happen and why whatever happened did,

  the soul’s traffic. Somehow we weathered all that.

  The chicken is in a museum somewhere now, worth

  more than God, I bet, and so much time has passed

  I can’t be sure which Willie made it. That night we had

  some of its smell on our fingers. But the men we found

  in the bar’s humiliating darkness still invited us in.

  from The Los Angeles Review

  REBECCA HAZELTON