Best American Poetry 2017 Read online

  Hamlet Texts Guildenstern about Playing upon the Pipe

  True that. Rue that.

  That whch wld cause us 2 mscnstrue

  that whch we alwys hve knwn 2 be true,

  that we r a part of an unholy crew

  that drms we cn do whtvr we do.

  2 be honest eschw that. Chw that

  fr a while. Msticate. Xpctorate.

  Engnder only that whch will elevate. Do that.

  Elminate that whch invites u 2 spculate,

  pooh pooh that. Untrue that. Undo that.

  At least try. Set ur azmuth 2 aim at what-

  evr sky will allow u 2 prsue that.

  And avoid at all csts the truths ur uncouth at,

  squndring ur youth at, growng long in the tooth at,

  7 a.m. drinkng vermouth at, 9 a.m. flyng to Duluth at.

  Fnd that hue in the sky. Thn cry. Boohoo that. Hew 2 that.

  True blue that sky course, that heart settng. Few do that. Sail 2 that.

  And 2 anything that wld skew that, u know what to say. Screw that.

  from The Antioch Review

  DAVID BRENDAN HOPES

  * * *

  Certain Things

  For the sake of my father, certain things

  must be done in a certain way:

  tightening of bolts, of nuts around threads;

  coiling of hoses; firm, instant replacement of lids;

  spreading of seed from the hand held just so,

  in furrows dug to the joint or the knuckle, depending;

  wash it when you use it, never put it up wet;

  don’t be opening and closing the screen door

  as if you were a cat.

  Be grateful for a job, a meal, a leg up.

  All that.

  In the seasons set aside for such emotions,

  of course I hated him.

  All things, even hatred, wear away.

  In the season set aside I became him,

  doing what he did in the way he did it,

  hiding the injured heart the way he hid it.

  Waking so many hours before full day

  from the dream

  that something certain’s gone astray.

  from New Ohio Review

  MAJOR JACKSON

  * * *

  The Flâneur Tends a Well-Liked Summer Cocktail

  curbside on an Arp-like table. He’s alone

  of course, in the arts district as it were, legs folded,

  swaying a foot so that his body seems to summon

  some deep immensity from all that surrounds:

  dusk shadows inching near a late-thirtyish couple debating

  the post-galactic abyss of sex with strangers,

  tourists ambling by only to disappear into the street’s gloomy mouth,

  a young Italian woman bending to retrieve

  a dropped MetroCard, its black magnetic strip facing up,

  a lone speckled brown pigeon breaking from a flock of rock

  doves, then landing near a crushed fast-food wrapper

  newly tossed by a bike messenger, the man chortling

  after a sip of flaxen-colored beer, remembering

  that, in the Gospel of John the body and glory converge

  linked to incarnation and so, perhaps, we manifest each other,

  a tiny shower of sparks erupting from the knife sharpener’s

  truck who daily leans a blade into stone, a cloudscape reflected

  in the rear windshield of a halted taxi where inside

  a trans woman applies auburn lipstick, the warlike

  insignia on the lapel jacket of a white-gloved

  doorman who opening a glass door gets a whiff

  of a dowager’s thick perfume and recalls baling timothy

  hay as a boy in Albania, the woman distractedly watching

  a mother discuss Robert Colescott’s lurid appropriations

  of modernist art over niçoise salad, suddenly frees her left breast

  from its cup where awaits the blossoming mouth of an infant

  wildly reaching for a galaxy of milk behind her dark areola,

  the sharp coughs of a student carrying a yoga mat,

  the day’s last light edging high-rises on the West Side

  so that they seem rimmed by fire just when the man says, And yet,

  immense the wages we pay boarding the great carousel of flesh.

  from Virginia Quarterly Review

  JOHN JAMES

  * * *

  History (n.)

  “I didn’t make these verses because I wanted to rival that fellow, or his poems, in artistry—I knew that wouldn’t be easy—but to test what certain dreams of mine might be saying and to acquit myself of any impiety, just in case they might be repeatedly commanding me to make this music.”

  —Plato, Phaedo

  Viewed from space, the Chilean volcano blooms.

  I cannot see it. It’s a problem of scale. History—the branch

  of knowledge dealing with past events; a continuous,

  systematic narrative of; aggregate deeds; acts, ideas, events

  that will shape the course of the future; immediate

  but significant happenings; finished, done with—“he’s history.”

  —

  Calbuco: men shoveling ash from the street.

  Third time in a week. And counting.

  Infinite antithesis. Eleven

  miles of ash in the air. What to call it—

  just “ash.” They flee to Ensenada.

  —

  The power of motives does not proceed directly from the will—

  a changed form of knowledge. Wind pushing

  clouds toward Argentina. Knowledge is merely involved.

  Ash falls, it is falling, it has fallen. Will fall. Already flights

  cancelled in Buenos Aires. I want to call it snow—

  what settles on the luma trees, their fruit black, purplish black,

  soot-speckled, hermaphroditic—if this book is unintelligible

  and hard on the ears—the oblong ovals of its leaves.

  Amos, fragrant. Family name Myrtus. The wood is extremely hard.

  —

  Ash falling on the concrete, falling on cars, ash

  on the windshields, windows, yards. They have lost

  all sense of direction. They might as well be deep

  in a forest or down in a well. They do not comprehend

  the fundamental principles. They have nothing in their heads.

  —

  The dream kept

    urging me on to do

  what I was doing—

    to make music—

  since philosophy,

    in my view, is

      the greatest music.

  —

  History—from the Greek historía, learning or knowing by inquiry. Historein (v.) to ask. The asking is not idle. From the French histoire, story. Hístor (Gk.) one who sees. It is just a matter of what we are looking for.

  from The Kenyon Review

  RODNEY JONES

  * * *

  Homecoming

  One place is as good as another to be born

  and return after years, like Odysseus to Ithaca or mildew to a rotting plank.

  How Sunday it all looks now, paved and pastured, fieldless and storeless.

  Burglar music. Late morning. No one home.

  And the past, still and under: its sawdust ice, its milk jugs screwed tight and

  suspended in spring water.

  County life, pre-telephone, without verbs.

  Small houses, a quarter of a mile apart, of whitewashed or unpainted clapboard,

  each with a well and outhouse.

  Larger houses with barns, chicken coops, toolsheds, and smokehouses. Hounds

  of some significance. Men. Women. Children.

  Nary and tarnation. A singing from the fields. A geeing and hawing.

  A voice here and there wi
th a smidgeon of Euclid and a soupcon of Cicero to

  hifalute what twanged from across the fence and the other side of the bucksaw.

  Each day of 1953 like a pupa in a chrysalis.

  Phenomenology buzzing like wasps in the stripped timbers of the gristmill.

  The road out busting from trace and logging ruts. Now and then a backfiring

  Studebaker with its doggy entourage and roostertails of dust.

  But less and less in 1954, a mare and wagon, orbited by a yearling colt.

  The evolution of the cabin to dogtrot, the boarding up of the hall between the

  west side’s living room, kitchen, and pantry, and the east side’s two bedrooms.

  Stone chimneys at each end, and on the porch across it, the kitty-holed door to

  the attic’s must, mud daubers, and déjà vu.

  A spinning wheel with spavined and missing spokes, a warped sidesaddle, boxes

  of wooden tools, gaiters, spectacles, dried gloves, shoe lasts, letters from dead to dead.

  The cellar beneath it all. Wooden casks, wine bottles dusky and obsolesced by the

  hardshell feminism of the great Protestant reawakening

  that quarried legions of infidels from saloons and brothels and restored them to

  their families. Portis’s own.

  Tom Portis’s vineyard east of the house, his vines of small sour grapes still strung

  with rusted baling wire to rotting posts.

  His continuance bolstered and intensified should a client void a decade and show

  up early morning, stumble-drunk, moaning, “Virgie, Virgie.”

  Prose fragments.

  The smokehouse. Hams, shoulders, and side meat interred in separate salt bins.

  The hog lot.

  The well into which, it has been told, Portis once dropped a Persian cat.

  And what is the name of the cat? And what word now from the after?

  ~

  Here are some verbs: woke, saw, stretched, heard, washed, smelled, sat, blessed,

  ate, listened, rose, waited, walked, felt, shat, dug, meditated, buried, gone

  though somewhere, perhaps by some odd fractal of the principle of the

  conservation of matter, a remnant of the original template holds.

  Home odor, unreconstructed, peasant, third world—

  “Nostalgia of the infinite,” the nearly forgotten Bob Watson called it.

  Maybe it’s just like that. Maybe it’s exactly what they say

  after years to the old when they were children.

  from The Kenyon Review

  FADY JOUDAH

  * * *

  Progress Notes

  The age of portrait is drugged. Beauty

  is symmetry so rare it’s a mystery.

  My left eye is smaller than my right,

  my big mouth shows my nice teeth perfectly

  aligned like Muslims in prayer.

  My lips are an accordion. Each sneeze

  a facial thumbprint. One corner

  of my mouth hangs downward when I want

  to hold a guffaw hostage. Bell’s Palsy perhaps

  or what Mark Twain said about steamboat piloting,

  that a doctor’s unable to look upon the blush

  in a young beauty’s face without thinking

  it could be a fever, a malar rash,

  a butterfly announcing a wolf. Can I lie

  face down now as cadavers posed

  on first anatomy lesson? I didn’t know mine

  was a woman until three weeks later

  we turned her over. Out of reverence

  there was to be no untimely exposure of donors,

  our patrons who were covered in patches

  of scrubs-green dish towels,

  and by semester’s end we were sick of all that,

  tossed mega livers and mammoth hearts

  into lab air and caught them. My body

  was Margaret. That’s what the death certificate said

  when it was released before finals. The cause

  of her death? Nothing memorable,

  frail old age. But the colonel on table nineteen

  with an accessory spleen had put a bullet through

  his temple, a final prayer. Not in entry or exit

  were there skull cracks to condemn the house

  of death, no shattered glass in the brain,

  only a smooth tunnel of deep violet that bloomed

  in concentric circles. The weekends were lonely.

  He had the most beautiful muscles

  of all 32 bodies that were neatly arranged,

  zipped up as if a mass grave had been disinterred.

  Or when unzipped and facing the ceiling

  had cloth over their eyes as if they’d just been executed.

  Gray silver hair, chiseled countenance,

  he was sixty-seven, a veteran of more than one war.

  I had come across that which will end me, ex-

  tend me, at least once, without knowing it.

  from The Kenyon Review

  MEG KEARNEY

  * * *

  Grackle

  What a grackle is doing perched on the rail

  of her baby’s crib, noiselessly twitching its

  tail, she doesn’t wonder. The way this baby

  gleams he’s bound to catch a grackle’s

  eye. Besides, birds have flit in and out

  of these baby dreams forever. Sapsucker,

  blue jay. Sparrow, kingfisher, titmouse.

  She just likes to say grackle, a crack-your-

  knuckles, hard-candy word. In the dream,

  her baby’s black as a grackle, meaning

  when she holds him to the light he shines

  purple and blue, a glittery bronze. Silent

  and nameless. Sometimes he is a she but

  always the dream-baby is hers. That is

  the miracle. Her nights of nursery rhymes

  and sorrow. Of yellow quilts and song

  birds. Enough to break a bow. Enough

  to fell a cradle.

  from The Massachusetts Review

  JOHN KOETHE

  * * *

  The Age of Anxiety

         isn’t an historical age,

  But an individual one, an age to be repeated

  Constantly through history. It could be any age

  When the self-absorbing practicalities of life

  Are overwhelmed by a sense of its contingency,

  A feeling that the solid body of this world

  Might suddenly dissolve and leave the simple soul

  That’s not a soul detached from tense and circumstance,

  From anything it might recognize as home.

  I like to think that it’s behind me now, that at my age

  Life assumes a settled tone as it explains itself

  To no one in particular, to everyone. I like to think

  That of those “gifts reserved for age,” the least

  Is understanding and the last a premonition of the

  Limits of the poem that’s never done, the poem

  Everyone writes in the end. I see myself on a stage,

  Declaiming, as the golden hour wanes, my long apology

  For all the wasted time I’m pleased to call my life—

  A complacent, measured speech that suddenly turns

  Fretful as the lights come up to show an empty theater

  Where I stand halting and alone. I rehearse these things

  Because I want to and I can. I know they’re quaint,

  And that they’ve all been heard before. I write them

  Down against the day when the words in my mouth

  Turn empty, and the trap door opens on the page.

  from Raritan

  YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA

  * * *

  from The Last Bohemian of Avenue A

  It makes me sad to look up

  at the crest of a building />
  & see washed-out names,

  decals, numbers, lettering

  half-gone, muted tinges

  of the past, edges of lives

  discolored & flaking off

  signs, the bold signatures

  now silenced & mildewed

  a hundred times in gray.

  I see them come & go, new

  faces with question marks

  & dollar signs in their eyes,

  believing they can still birth

  the Immaculate. But I know

  when the heart’s only a big

  mouth & the pumping is not

  a cutting contest at Slug’s.

  A paint job has taken away

  patinas of years, romance,

  & chance. I have stumbled

  upon a thing that stuns me

  beneath a busted light globe.

  Even if loneliness arrives

  around 3 a.m., it isn’t easy

  to touch myself because

  it’s a sin. But now & then

  I must hold on to something

  to keep me here on Earth,

  in the middle of an old tune

  & a new one—I touch myself

  as a face blooms in my head

  & somehow worlds collide

  gently. What set did she step

  from, or was it on my last gig

  at Smoke? Or, maybe she was

  wearing a garden of orchids

  when we passed, or the face

  of a waitress among changes

  in a Trane solo as I almost

  walked in front of a taxicab.

  When I touch myself I am

  reaching for some blue note

  on the other side of an abyss.

  Mary Travers stands before me

  in Washington Square Park

  in a silvery dress, whispering

  “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”

  as I lean against Garibaldi

  reaching for his sword,

  & blow riffs of luster,