The Best American Poetry 2019 Page 8
An entire alphabet can be stuttered in a few gunshots.
So often it’s the boyfriend spiraling down the chamber:
his words lodged in the barrel behind the bullet fast and frenzied.
We all wonder why the trash at the dump
never stops burning, why the blind look to the wind.
The rain stumbles outside the window:
the tombé before the heavy pas de bourrée of storm.
Basilica di San Marco in Venice speaks
two languages: Greek and Latin, and I am jealous
of those with two tongues like the white pine
whose trunk cracks and whose needles whistle
to the bilingual nuthatch.
The sun torches the tips of the trees
on a descent from a world where no woman is safe.
Even the man who loved her wanted her dead.
The burning bush is an invasive species,
yet cardinals and chickadees flock to its red seeds
and flamed leaves in the fall. I should cut it to a stump
and rot its roots, but instead I admire its show of color,
watching the damage as it spreads.
from New England Review
MAJOR JACKSON
* * *
In Memory of Derek Alton Walcott
1
Island traffic slows to a halt
as screeching gulls reluctant
to lift heavenward
congregate like mourners in salt-
crusted kelp, as the repellent
news spreads to colder shores:
Sir Derek is no more.
Bandwidths, clogged by streaming
tributes, carry the pitch
of his voice, less so his lines, moored
as they are to a fisherman’s who strains
in the Atlantic
then hearing, too, drops his rod, the reel
unspooling like memory till
his gaped mouth matches
the same look in his wicker creel,
that frozen shock, eyes marble
a different catch.
Pomme-Arac trees, sea grapes,
and laurels sway, wrecked having lost
one who heard their leaves’
rustic dialect as law, grasped
their bows as edicts from the first
garden that sowed faith—
and believe he did, astonished
at the bounty of light, like Adam,
over Castries, Cas-
en-Bas, Port of Spain, the solace
of drifting clouds, rains like hymns
then edens of grass,
ornate winds on high verandas
carrying spirits who survived
that vile sea crossing,
who floated up in his stanzas,
the same souls Achille saw alive,
the ocean their coffin—
faith, too, in sunsets, horizons
whose auric silhouettes divide
and spawn reflection,
which was his pen’s work, devotion
twinned with delight, divining
like a church sexton.
Poetry is empty without
discipline, without piety,
he cautions somewhere,
even his lesser rhymes amount
to more than wrought praise but amplify
his poems as high prayer.
So as to earn their wings above,
pelicans move into tactical
formation then fly
low like jet fighters in honor of
him, nature’s mouth, their aerial
salute and goodbye.
2
Derek, each journey we make,
whether Homeric or not,
follows the literal wake
of some other craft’s launch,
meaning to sense the slightest
motions in unmoving waters
is half the apprentice’s
training before he oars
out, careful to coast, break-
ing English’s calm surface.
What you admired in Eakins
in conversation at some café
(New Orleans? Philly?) was
how his rower seemed to listen
to ripples on the Schuylkill as
much as to his breath, both silent
on his speaking canvas.
Gratitude made you intolerant
of the rudeness of the avant-
garde or any pronouncements
of the “new,” for breathing is
legacy and one’s rhythm,
though the blood’s authentic
transcription, hems us
to ancestors like a pulse. This,
I fathom, is what you meant
when exalting the merits
of a fellow poet: that man
is at the center of language,
at the center of the song.
Yet a reader belongs to another age
and, likely to list our wrongs
more than the strict triumphs
of our verse, often retreats
like a vanished surf, spume
frothing on a barren beach.
The allure of an artist’s works
these days is measured
by his ethics, thus our books,
scrubbed clean, rarely mention
the shadowless dark that settles
like an empire over a page. Your nib,
like the eye of a moon, flashed into sight
the source of Adam’s barbaric cry.
3
Departed from paradise,
each Nobody a sacrifice,
debating whose lives matter
whereon a golden platter
our eyes roll dilated by hate
from Ferguson to Kuwait.
You, maître, gave in laughter
but also for the hereafter
an almost unbearable
truth: we are the terrible
history of warring births
destined for darkest earth.
So as cables of optic lights
bounce under oceans our white
pain, codified as they are
and fiber-layered in Kevlar,
we hear ourselves in you,
where “race” exiles us to
stand lost as single nations
awaiting your revelations.
A shirtless boy, brown as bark,
gallops alongshore, bareback
and free on a horse until he fades,
a shimmering, all that remains.
from The Paris Review and Poetry Daily
ILYA KAMINSKY
* * *
from “Last Will and Testament”
1.
Because cemeteries are too pricy
I would like to be deposited on a public bench
and not in the earth
but in the middle of September
at the end of wonder:
wrap me in newspapers, darlings,
and run!
I want to live my death
on a public bench
next to a barbershop—
die, when it is time to cut my hair so I can save four dollars!
I was always happy in barbershops.
Now happiness,
come blow your nose in my hands—
I want to die on a public bench—
those who watch me in
the street
say
something in him wants to be entered and picked clean.
Be careless, life!
Wrap me in newspaper on a park bench
so some enterprising schoolchild
can filch from my eyes
two dimes
and replace them with two US postal stamps.
3.
From a park bench I watch my pregnant wife chase pigeons on the piazza
Katie!
You have got nerve!
I have so much love, too much love, I cannot control myself!
Plan A:
I shoot myself. And the earth is mine.
but the earth has never been mine!
Those who say the planet is theirs should pay higher taxes!
Katie and I are kissing at 3 oclock and at 4 oclock and at 5 oclock
our kisses interrupted only
by the ritual blowing of my nose
Plan B:
—I want a pillow-fight
with a woman lit by freckles! I want to live in a large apartment of her mouth.
A serious girl
who when in the middle of the night I wake her with kisses
laughs.
You must control yourself, sir.
Professor, you must control yourself!
8.
I, a person exhausted by his own happiness—
I have so much love this morning, I
cannot control myself
In these last eight minutes
from a park bench
I want to step again and again on cement of life
I, in this my 41st year of trespass on earth,
watch death:
in a body
that stands on a platform
watches death, like a lone cross-country train, transport a spark.
9.
Snow has eaten 1/4 of me
yet I believe
against all evidence
these snowflakes
are my letters of recommendation
here is a man worth falling on.
from The Paris Review
RUTH ELLEN KOCHER
* * *
We May No Longer Consider the End
The time of birds died sometime between
When Robert Kennedy, Jr., disappeared and the Berlin
Wall came down. Hope was pro forma then.
We’d begun to talk about shelf-life. Parents
Thought they’d gotten somewhere. I can’t tell you
What to make of this now without also saying that when
I was 19 and read in a poem that the pure products of America go crazy
I felt betrayed. My father told me not to whistle because I
Was a girl. He gave me my first knife and said to keep it in my right
Hand and to keep my right hand in my right pocket when I walked at night.
He showed me the proper kind of fist and the sweet spot on the jaw
To leverage my shorter height and upper-cut someone down.
There were probably birds on the long walk home but I don’t
Remember them because pastoral is not meant for someone
With a fist in each pocket waiting for a reason.
from Poem-a-Day
DEBORAH LANDAU
* * *
Soft Targets
It was good getting drunk in the undulant city.
Whiskey lopping off the day’s fear.
Dawn came with an element of Xanax.
Dusk came and I dumbed myself down.
Where there were brides, grooms—
these bored boysoldiers with iPhones and guns.
I’m a soft target, you’re a soft target,
and the city has a hundred hundred thousand softs.
The pervious skin, the softness of the face,
the wrist inners, the hips, the lips, the tongue,
the global body,
its infinite permutable softnesses.
Soft targets, soft readers, drinkers,
pedestrians in rain—
In the failing light we walked out
and now we share a room with it
(would you like to read to me in the soft,
would you like to enter me in the soft,
would you like a lunch of me in the soft,
in its long delirium?).
The good news is we have each other.
The bad news is: Kalashnikov assault rifles,
submachine guns, pistols, ammunition,
four boxes packed with thousands of small steel balls.
O you who want to slaughter us,
we’ll be dead soon enough what’s the rush.
And this our only world.
As you can see it has a problem.
As you can see the citizens are hanging heavy.
The citizens’ minds are out.
Eros, Eros, in Paris we stayed all night
in a seraphic cocktail haze
despite the blacked-out theater,
the shuttered panes.
Tonight we’re the most tender of soft targets,
pulpy with alcohol and all a-sloth.
Monsieur can we get a few more?
There are unmistakable signs of trouble,
but we have days and days still.
Let’s be giddy, maybe. Time lights a little fire.
We are animal hungry down to our intricate bones.
O beautiful habits of living, let me dwell on you awhile.
from The American Poetry Review
QURAYSH ALI LANSANA
* * *
Higher Calling
how you, heathen passenger, gonna help the nun
sitting across the aisle on a LA bound flight
dressed in drab habit, bone scapular & bright belief
ovahstand she needs to get off the damn cell phone?
her tongue central american cataclysm & barrio Jah.
who am i to tell a mercy angel the rule she must close
her flip phone? my sisters held sister bertrille close
in the early seventies. sally field as flying nun
could do no wrong. when she took to sky, Almighty Jah
lifting palms to bring her near, frock as kite, flight
rebuking surf board. the vestal in 13D cups phone
with large hands, hands large enough for holy, belief
like my auntie, mama’s third sister, who shares belief
and the flying nun’s last name. pastor bonnell is closer
to the Prophet. her whisper fragile on the telephone
when we talk of mama. both labored for stiff anglican nuns
over thirty years at the hospital their nine children took flight
in a small town uncertain if black people could know Jah.
uncles, cousins and friends offer daily petitions to Jah
to climb inside aunties breaths, feed her good news and belief.
she is the last matriarch and we are selfish. please don’t fly
from us, we pray. we want to shelter her, wrap her close
in cotton and light. weekday mornings they come, the nuns
who wash her body, chanting glory. on weekends they phone
hallelujahs. if i ask, will this saint three feet away send phone
mercies to my auntie? will frail pastor bonnell decipher Jah
in spanish? she’s sending texts at 45,000 feet now, this rogue nun
who exorcises airplane procedure. the flight attendant believes
otherwise. his syrupy sweet requests fall mute as he bends close
yet again. his tongue is not sanctified. this anointed saint flies
heavenward hourly. only twice daily for the exasperated flight
attendant. who is the service provider for sister’s cell phone
hotline to Jesus? five hours on southwest, embrace of sun close
and blinding. city of the angels not far. before every take-off i ask Jah
for traveling mercies, beg for a protective hedge in queasy belief
give thanks for safe journey. extra blessings to sit next to a nun.
from Gulf Coast
LI-YOUNG LEE
* * *
The Undressing
Listen,
she says.
I’m listening, I answer
and kiss her chin.
Obviously, you’re not, she says.
I kiss her nose and both of her eyes.
I can do more than one thing at a time,
I tell her. Trust me.
I kiss her cheeks.
You’ve heard of planting lotuses in a fire, she says.
You’ve heard of sifting gold from sand.
You know
perfumed flesh, in anklets, and spirit, unadorned,
take turns at lead and follow,
one in action and repose.
I kiss her neck and behind her ear.
But there are things you need reminded of, she says.
So remind me, Love, I say.
There are stories we tell ourselves, she says.
There are stories we tell others.
Then there’s the sum
of our hours
death will render legible.
I unfasten the top button of her blouse
and nibble her throat with more kisses.
Go on, I say, I’m listening.
You better be, she says,
You’ll be tested.
I undo her second,
her third, fourth, and last buttons quickly,
and then lean in
to kiss her collarbone.
She says, The world
is a story that keeps beginning.
In it, you have lived severally disguised:
bright ash, dark ash, mirror, moon;
a child waking in the night to hear the thunder;
a traveler stopping to ask the way home.
And there’s still
the butterfly’s night sea-journey to consider.
She says,
There are dreams we dream alone.
There are dreams we dream with others.
Then there’s the lilac’s secret
life of fire, of God
accomplished in the realm
of change and desire.
Pushing my hand away from her breast,
she keeps talking.
Alone, you dream in several colors: Blue,
wishing, and following the river.
In company, you dream in several others:
The time you don’t have.
The time left over.
And the time it takes.
Your lamp has a triple wick:
remembering, questioning, and sheltering