The Best American Poetry 2013 Page 8

In most settings, racists stick out

  like Count Basie’s Orchestra in the middle

  of a prairie, but they’re as awkward as he is

  elegant compared to the world around him.

  And, if you still don’t get it, imagine

  a chain gang with perfect pitch

  singing Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick Out of You,”

  to their overseer, whose frustration swells so

  for an “authentic-nigger work song,”

  he and his crew demonstrate their darkest

  desires and break into song themselves,

  “Camptown Ladies Come Out Tonight,

  Doo Dah, Doo Dah,” kicking up their heels

  in the dirt, tasting an old slave

  trick on their tongues, each syllable

  falling from their lips like a boll

  of cotton. Funny, to the naked eye,

  but consider the Native American

  who speaks Yiddish, appearing out of the dust

  of the Old West, reminding us

  of how we learn to comfort ourselves

  by making ourselves a little uncomfortable

  over time in the fossil of race.

  Jump cut: Black Bart, our hero, enters

  town where danger awaits

  him, our hero who we hope

  to see beat up bad guys

  and win the woman, even when

  the hero is black and the woman,

  Lili von Shtupp, is German. “One false move

  and the nigger gets it.” Yes, self-sacrifice

  with his gun to his own head, but

  the unwitting white liberals save him

  from himself, which is their life’s mission.

  You see, what’s so funny about racists,

  is that they never get the joke, because

  the joke always carries a bit of truth.

  Notice how we can laugh only when we recognize

  a Sambo of our own design, by communal hands—

  in our own likeness, a likeness we own—

  so we can laugh at the absurd pain of it all.

  This joke, like an aloe released on a wound,

  like a black man trying to do a job

  in a town in which he’s not wanted,

  like a black man unzipping his pants

  in the Old West to a white woman in a hotel

  room in the center of this town. Did I mention

  how he was released from a chain gang?

  Did I mention how she was an exotic dancer

  who slept with men for money, helping them

  hang their insecurities on a hook

  on the back of a hotel-room door before entering?

  Careful with your laughter; one false move and

  Nigger here gets appropriated. That’s not funny

  to you? Well, when they saw themselves

  on screen in their comedy-drama romance,

  in the darkness of the theater, they laughed.

  And they needed to see it; it had to project

  on the wide screen to get a good cathartic laugh

  from the tragedy of the 20th century.

  And it’s okay to laugh at these ironies

  today because they’re blown from a wind

  of past pain, with the velocity of memory.

  You see, when the Jewish artist has suffered

  enough he knows he can strike back

  with just a stroke of laughter: A black man shtupping

  a German floozy, who tries to ensnare him

  between her legs, but gets hoisted by her own

  garter petard? Well, that’s just some funny scheiße.

  Now, please, excuse all this humor

  wrapped in truth—or, is it a chiasmus of this?

  Whether you’re ready or not, stand back, please,

  and back away from all those stereotypes

  restricting you from stereotypes you

  aspire toward. As you deny self

  through elective surgery on your nose or lips,

  excuse me, please, as I rear back in laughter;

  and excuse me as I recall the 1970s

  and remember myself laughing, laughing

  blue-black gut bursting songs of truth. Yeah,

  please excuse me folks as I whip this out.

  from The Virginia Quarterly Review

  LAWRENCE JOSEPH

  Syria

  . . . and when, then, the imagination is transmogrified

  in circles of hatred, circles of vengeance

  and killing, of stealing and deceit? Behind

  the global imperia is the interrogation cell. It’s not

  a good story. Neither the Red Crescent

  nor journalists are permitted entry, the women tell

  how men and boys are separated, taken in buses

  and never seen again, tanks in the streets

  with machine guns with no shells in the barrels

  because the army fears that those who will use them

  might defect. Who knows what has happened,

  what is happening, what will happen? God knows.

  God knows everything. The boy? He is much more

  than Mafia; he, and his, own the country. His militias

  will fight to the death if for no other reason than

  if he’s overthrown they will be killed, too. “Iraq,

  you remember Iraq, don’t you?” she shouts,

  a refugee. Her English is good. Reached via Skype,

  she speaks anonymously, afraid of repercussions.

  “You won’t believe what I have seen”—her voice

  lowered almost to a whisper—“a decapitated

  body with a dog’s head sewn on it, for example.”

  Yes, I know, it’s much more complicated than that.

  “It’s the arena right now where the major players are,”

  the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs concludes

  his exclusive CNN interview. Dagestan—its province

  in the North Caucasus—is what the Russians compare

  it to, warring clans, sects; Lebanese-like civil war

  will break out and spread across the region. Online,

  a report—Beirut, the Associated Press—

  this morning, “28 minutes ago. 4 Said to Be Dead

  at Syrian University,” one Samer Qawass,

  thrown, it is said, by pro-regime students

  out of the fifth-floor window of his dormitory room,

  dying instantly from the fall . . .

  from The Nation

  ANNA JOURNEY

  Wedding Night: We Share an Heirloom Tomato on Our Hotel Balcony Overlooking the Ocean in Which Natalie Wood Drowned

  for David

  We imagine Natalie held a gelatinous green

  sliver on her tongue, that its watery

  disk caught the lamplight before

  she slipped from her yacht

  to drown in the waves off this island. This was

  thirty years ago. And our tomato’s strain

  stretches back decades, to an heirloom seed

  saved before either of us was born,

  before Natalie’s elbow

  brushed the clouded jade

  face of the ancestral fruit

  in a Catalina stand, before she handed it

  to her husband, saying, This one. We hover

  near the plate, where the last

  half of our shadowed tomato

  sits in its skin’s deep pleats. I lean

  toward you to trace each

  salted crease with a thumbnail—

  brined and wild as those lines

  clawed in the green

  side of the yacht’s

  rubber dinghy. Those lingering

  shapes the coroner found—the drowned

  actress’s scratch marks. That night

  we first met, I had another lover

  but you didn’t

  care. My Bellini’s peach puree,
/>
  our waiter said, had sailed across

  the Atlantic, from France. It swirled

  as I sipped and sank

  to the glass bottom

  of my champagne flute. You whispered,

  Guilt is the most

  useless emotion. After Natalie rolled

  into the waves, the wet feathers

  of her down coat wrapped

  their white anchors

  at her hips. This was 1981. I turned

  a year old that month and somewhere

  an heirloom seed

  washed up. You felt an odd breeze

  knock at your elbow as I took

  my first step. We hadn’t yet met.

  Tonight, we watch the wet date palms tip

  toward the surf and, curling,

  swallow their tongues.

  from The Southern Review

  LAURA KASISCHKE

  Perspective

  Like the lake turned to

  steel by the twilit

  sky. Like

  the Flood in the toilet

  to the housefly.

  Like the sheet

  thrown over

  the secret love. Like

  the sheet thrown over

  the blood on the rug.

  Or the pages

  of the novel

  scattered by the wind:

  The end

  at the beginning

  in the middle again.

  And the sudden sense.

  The polished lens.

  The revision

  revisioned, as if

  as if.

  As if

  the secret—

  had you told me when.

  Who I thought

  we were, every-

  where we went.

  from New England Review

  VICTORIA KELLY

  When the Men Go Off to War

  What happens when they leave

  is that the houses fold up like paper dolls,

  the children roll up their socks and sweaters

  and tuck the dogs into little black suitcases.

  Across the street the trees are unrooting,

  the mailboxes rising up like dandelion stems,

  and eventually we too float off,

  the houses tucked neatly inside our purses, and the children

  tumbling gleefully after us,

  and beneath us the base has disappeared, the rows

  of pink houses all the way to the ocean—gone,

  and the whole city has slipped off the white earth

  like a table being cleared for lunch.

  We set up for a few weeks at a time

  in places like Estonia or Laos—

  places where they still have legends,

  where a town of women appearing in the middle of the night

  is surprising but not unheard of. The locals come to watch

  our strange carnival unpacking in some wheat field

  outside Paldiski—we invite them in for coffee,

  forgetting for a minute

  that some of our own men won’t come home again;

  and sometimes, a wife or two won’t either.

  She’ll meet someone else, say, and

  it’s one of those things we don’t talk about,

  how people fall in and out of love,

  and also, what the chaplains are for.

  And then, a few days before the planes fly in

  we return. We roll out the sidewalks and make the beds,

  tether the trees to the yard.

  On the airfield, everything is as it should be—

  our matte red lipstick, the babies blanketed inside strollers.

  Only, our husbands look at us a little sadly,

  the way people do when they know

  they have changed but don’t want to say it.

  Instead they say, What have you been doing all this time?

  And we say, Oh you know, the dishes,

  and they laugh and say,

  Thank God some things stay the same.

  from Southwest Review

  DAVID KIRBY

  Pink Is the Navy Blue of India

  Flea market guy tells me the pornos are five dollars

  each or three for ten and then leans in conspiratorially

  to say “get you a bunch,” which is sound advice from

  his perspective, I’m so sure, though I could watch them

  all and still not know more than I do now. Friend tells me

  he likes this woman we see in a bar, and when I point out

  that she’s wearing a ring, he says when women wear rings,

  it just means they “do it”—of course, we’d have to ask

  their handsome husbands about that, wouldn’t we! Also,

  was sex better in olden days? In the movies, people from

  roughly the Dark Ages through Victorian times are always

  wearing clothes when they do it, and the guys seem

  to be having all the fun, if by “fun” you mean a fumbling

  upskirts ram job that looks more like mixed martial arts

  than making love, which, I realize, can take different

  forms, depending on the preferences, time available,

  and chemical states of the doer as well as the doee or,

  in the most desirable version, the two co-doers,

  who would thereby be co-doees as well. Still, repression’s

  got a lot going for it: from the repressed mind

  comes beautiful stories, whereas from the liberated mind comes

  websites that show women having sex with vegetables.

  Want an example of a beautiful story? Take Tristan

  and Isolde: Isolde of Ireland is betrothed to King

  Mark of Cornwall, who sends his nephew, Tristan,

  to Ireland to escort Isolde back to Cornwall. Big mistake!

  They do it, King Mark finds out, everything

  goes to hell in a handbasket. So what makes it a beautiful story?

  Not because it ends happily, which it so doesn’t,

  but because everyone fulfills his or her nature, stays

  in character, does what’s right for them and nobody else.

  “It is unbelievable that Tristan should ever be in a position

  to marry Isolde,” writes Swiss critic Denis de Rougemont

  in his monumental study Love in the Western

  World, for “she typifies the woman a man does not marry . . .

  once she became his wife she would no longer be what

  she is, and he would no longer love her. Just think of

  a Madame Tristan!” Wait, let me try. No, you’re right,

  Denis—can’t be done! But until things go all pear-shaped

  for the lovers, there’s a huge payoff: between

  the beginning of the story, where everybody’s just

  walking around and shaking hands with one another,

  and the end, which is filled with the usual shouting

  and finger-pointing, not to mention poison draughts

  and black-sailed death ships and blood-dripping

  broadswords, there’s the yummy part, where, in Denis

  de Rougemont’s words, Tristan and Isolde are

  “exiled into ecstasy.” See, that would be excellent,

  right, reader? You’d be exiled from your usual pleasures,

  like dollar-off dry cleaning every Thursday and so-called

  organic vegetables that are not grown by any method

  verifiable by science but that you eat anyway. But you

  wouldn’t care. You’d be all ecstatic! Fashion maven Diana

  Vreeland says, “Elegance is refusal.” She also said, “Pink

  is the navy blue of India,” and I don’t know what

  that means, either. But it sounds good, right? Sounds like a secret.

  from Plume

  NOELLE KOCOT

  Aphids

  The long-legged
aphids, rich in their summertime,

  The anchorite rolling around on the wet grass,

  Amulet of a constellation, oh, it speaks louder

  Than any church bell! I am here, at the tea table,

  And the curio is very small. I drag the alphabet

  To and fro, and drink non-alcoholic cocktails by

  The muddy creek. Someone, tell me my life already,

  Someone reliable—the phone psychics all suck,

  And besides, that’s playing with demons. If I dis-

  Connect my woolly body from what I am inured

  To use, tell me what grief lingers in a medieval

  Box, the universal liquor of a swinging child. I

  Don’t know where I’m headed, but the star-lit trees

  Above my path never go out. They sing songs to me

  In the daytime, and their music boxes are as snows

  Falling. Sometimes I peek, as the aphids eat at the road.

  from Conduit

  JOHN KOETHE

  Eggheads

  In the fifties people who were smart

  And looked smart were called eggheads.

  Adlai Stevenson, who was bald and went to Princeton,

  Was the quintessential egghead, and so he lost

  To Dwight Eisenhower, the president of Columbia.

  Dave Brubeck was an egghead, with his horn-rimmed

  Glasses and all those albums of jazz at colleges,

  Though on NPR last week he claimed he wasn’t smart.

  I took piano lessons from his brother Howard

  In the Thearle Music Building in San Diego in the fifties,

  Which probably would have made me an egghead by contagion

  If it hadn’t been for Sputnik, which made being smart

  Fashionable for a while (as long as you didn’t look smart).

  Beatniks weren’t eggheads: eggheads were uptight

  And buttoned down, wore black shoes instead of sandals

  And didn’t play bongo drums or read poetry in coffee houses.

  What sent me on this memory trip was the realization

  That stupidity was in style again, in style with a vengeance—

  Not that it was ever out of style, or confined to politics

  (“We need more show and less tell,” wrote an editor of Poetry

  About a poem of mine that he considered too abstract).

  The new stupidity doesn’t have a name or a characteristic look,

  And it’s not just in style, it is a style, a style of seeing everything as style,

  Like Diesel jeans, or glasses and T-shirts, or a way of talking on TV: