The Best American Poetry 2019 Read online

  made of your heart’s and mind’s agreement.

  With it, you navigate the two seas: Day

  with everything inside it;

  night and all that’s missing.

  Meanwhile, I encounter difficulty

  with her skirt knot, her fingers

  confounding my progress,

  as she goes on reviewing the doubtful points.

  There are words we say in the dark.

  There are words we speak in the light.

  And sometimes they’re the same words.

  From where I’ve been sitting beside her,

  I drop to one knee before her.

  There’s the word we give

  to another.

  There’s the word we keep

  with ourselves.

  And sometimes they’re the same word.

  I slip one hand inside her blouse

  and find her naked waist.

  My other hand cradles her bare foot

  from which her sandal has fallen.

  A word has many lives.

  Quarry, the word is game, unpronounceable.

  Pursuant, the word is judge, pronouncing sentence.

  Affliction, the word is a thorn, chastising.

  I nudge her blouse open with my nose

  and kiss her breastbone.

  The initiating word

  embarks, fixed between sighted wings, and

  said, says, saying, none are the bird,

  each just moments of the flying.

  Doubling back, the word is infinite.

  We circle ourselves,

  the fruit rots in time,

  and we’re just passengers of our voices,

  a bird in one ear crying, Two!

  There are two worlds!

  A bird in the other ear urging, Through!

  Be through with this world and that world!

  Her blouse lapses around her shoulders,

  and I bend lower

  to kiss her navel.

  There are voices that wake us in the morning, she says.

  There are voices that keep us up all night.

  I lift my face and look into her eyes. I tell her,

  The voices I follow

  to my heart’s shut house say,

  A member of the late

  and wounded light enjoined to praise,

  each attends a song that keeps leaving.

  Now, I’m fondling her breasts

  and kissing them. Now,

  I’m biting her nipples.

  Not meaning to hurt her,

  I’m hurting her a little,

  and for these infractions I receive

  the gentlest tugs at my ear.

  She says,

  All night, the lovers ask, Do you love me?

  Over and over, the manifold beloved answers,

  I love you. Back and forth,

  merging, parting, folding, spending,

  the lovers’ voices

  and the voices of the beloved

  are the ocean’s legion scaling earth’s black bell,

  their bright crested foam

  the rudimentary beginnings

  of bridges and wings, the dream of flying,

  and the yearning to cross over.

  Now, I’m licking her armpit. I’m inhaling

  its bitter herbal fumes and savoring

  its flavor of woodsmoke. I’ve undone

  the knot to her skirt.

  Bodies have circled bodies

  from the beginning, she says,

  but the voices of lovers

  are Creation’s most recent flowers, mere buds

  of fire nodding on their stalks.

  In love, we see

  God burns hidden, turning

  inside everything that turns.

  And everything turns. Everything

  is burning.

  But all burning is not the same.

  Some fires kindle freedom.

  Some fires consolidate your bondage.

  Do you know the difference?

  I tell her, I want you to cup your breasts

  in both of your hands

  and offer them to me.

  I want you to make them wholly

  available to me.

  I want to be granted open liberty

  to leave many tiny

  petal-shaped bruises,

  like little kisses, all over you.

  One and one is one, she says,

  Bare shineth in bare.

  Think, she says, of the seabirds

  we watched at dawn

  wheeling between that double blue

  above and below them.

  Defined by the gravity they defy,

  they’re the radiant shadows of what they resist,

  and their turns and arcs in air

  that will never remember them

  are smiles on the face of the upper abyss.

  Their flying makes

  our inner spaciousness visible,

  even habitable, restoring us

  to infinity, we beings of non-being,

  each so recent a creature,

  and only lately spirits

  learning how to love.

  Shrill, their winged hungers

  fill the attic blue

  and signal our nagging jeopardy:

  Death’s bias, the slope

  of our lives’ every minute.

  I want to hear you utter

  the sharpest little cries of tortured bliss, I say,

  like a slapped whelp spurt

  exquisite gasps of delighted pleasure.

  But true lovers know, she says,

  hunger vacant of love is a confusion,

  spoiling and squandering

  such fruit love’s presence wins.

  The harvest proves the vine

  and the hearts of the ones who tend it.

  Everything else is gossip, guessing

  at love’s taste.

  The menace of the abyss will be subdued, I say,

  when I extort from you the most lovely cries

  and quivering whispered pleas

  and confused appeals of, Stop, and, More, and, Harder.

  To love, she says. For nothing.

  What birds, at home in their sky,

  have dared more?

  What circus performer,

  the tent above him, the net below,

  has risked so much? What thinker, what singer,

  both trading for immortality?

  Nothing saves him who’s never loved.

  No world is safe in that one’s keeping.

  We are travelers among other travelers

  in an outpost by the sea.

  We meet in transit, strange to each other,

  like birds of passage between a country and a country,

  and suffering from the same affliction of sleeplessness,

  we find each other in the night

  while others sleep. And between

  the languages you speak and the several I remember,

  we convene at the one we have in common,

  a language neither of us were born to.

  And we talk. We talk with our voices,

  and we talk with our bodies.

  And behind what we say,

  the ocean’s dark shoulders rise and fall all night,

  the planet’s massive wings ebbing and surging.

  I tell her, Our voices shelter each other,

  figures in a dream of refuge

  and sanctuary.

  Therefore, she says,

  designations of North, South, East, and West,

  Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall,

  first son, second son, first daughter, second daughter,

  change, but should correspond

  to a current picture of the sky.

  Each of our days fulfills

  the measures of the sanctum

  and its great tables’ rounds.

  The tables are not round.

  Or, n
ot only round.

  At every corner,

  opposites emerge, and you meet yourself.

  I bow my head

  and raise her foot to my mouth.

  The pillared tables make a tower and a ladder.

  They constitute the throne and the crown.

  The crown is not for your

  head. The throne is not your seat.

  The days on which the tables stand

  will be weighed and named.

  And the days are not days.

  Not the way you might understand days.

  The tables summon the feast

  and are an aspect of the host.

  The smell of her foot

  makes me think of saddles.

  I lick her instep. I kiss her toes. I kiss her ankle.

  Don’t you kiss my lips

  with that mouth, she says.

  Gold bit, I think.

  Tender spur, I think.

  I kiss her calves. I kiss her knees.

  I kiss the insides of her thighs.

  I’m thinking about her hip bones. I’m tonguing

  the crease where her thigh and her belly meet.

  The rounds enclose the dance,

  she says.

  The round and the square together

  determine the dimensions of the ark, she says.

  The water is rising as we speak.

  Are you paying attention? she says,

  One and one is two.

  You and me are three. A long arithmetic

  no temporal hand reckons

  rules galaxies and ants, exact

  and exacting. Lovers obey,

  sometimes contradicting human account.

  The smell of her body

  mixes with her perfume and makes me woozy.

  All being tends toward fire, I say.

  All being tends toward fire,

  sayeth the fire, she says, correcting me.

  All being tends toward water, sayeth the water,

  Light, sayeth the light.

  Wings, sayeth the birds.

  Voice, sayeth the voiceless.

  Give up guessing, she says, give up

  these frightened gestures of a stooped heart.

  You’ve done all your learning with others in mind.

  You’ve done all your teaching thinking only of yourself.

  Saving the world, you oppress people.

  Abandon educated words and honored acts.

  I want you to touch me

  as if you want to know me, not arouse me.

  And by God, sing! For nothing. Singing

  is origin. Out of that modulated trembling, cosmic

  and rooted in the primordial, quantum and concealed

  in the temporal, all forms come to be.

  Each thing, born of the myriad in concert, is one song

  variously sung. Each thing flourishes by singing

  and returns to vanish into song.

  Your body is that whereby song is conducted.

  Singing is that whereby your body is completed.

  Singing develops all things.

  Dying is singing’s consummation.

  Thinking, you remain entangled

  in the coils of your world.

  Singing, you marry all possible worlds.

  You know, from all of your green and branching hours

  that so soon die unremarked, general and redundant,

  the hours you sing return to you in true scale and degree.

  The hours you measure by singing return winged

  and noted, throated, eyed, and whirring-hearted.

  Return red-crested, blue-feathered, black-frocked,

  striped, spotted, flecked, and fine-boned.

  But don’t stop there. Sing the tree,

  sing the All, sing the lot

  of your time, and uncover the body of the Word,

  the compass of compasses. Sing change

  and the principle of wings, the laws of seeing and hearing,

  rising and falling, harmony and strife. Sing all

  the ungraspable, the descending, ascending signatures,

  and you sing the name of life.

  Call every one of you to the feast.

  Now, I’m drooling along her ribs.

  I’m smacking my lips and tongue to better taste

  her mossy, nutty, buttery, acrid sweat.

  I know you more than I know, she says.

  My body, astonished, answers to your body

  without me telling it to.

  Inside her is the safest place to be.

  Inside her, with all those other mysteries,

  those looming immensities:

  god, time, death, childhood.

  Listen, she says,

  There’s one more thing.

  Regarding the fires, there are two.

  Left and right, they grow wiser in the same house.

  Up and down, the higher encases the lower,

  and the lower clings to the higher.

  Inner and outer, these two illuminations

  are a thousand illuminations.

  But I’m thinking,

  My hands know things my eyes can’t see.

  My eyes see things my hands can’t hold.

  Listen, she says,

  Never let the fires go out.

  The paler, the hotter.

  But I’m thinking, Pale alcove.

  I’m thinking, My heart ripens with news

  the rest of me waits to hear.

  Are you listening?

  But I’m not listening.

  I’m thinking,

  A nest of eggs for my crown, please.

  And for my cushion, my weight in grapes.

  I’m thinking, In one light,

  love might look like siege.

  In another light, rescue

  might look like danger.

  She says, The seeds of fire are ours to mother.

  The dust, the shavings,

  and all spare materials

  must be burned in both fires,

  the visible and the invisible.

  Even the nails burned in them.

  Even the tools burned.

  And then the oven dismantled and burned.

  Have you been hearing me?

  For 20,000 years, human groups have thrived

  by subtle and not so subtle mechanisms

  of expulsion, exclusion, rejection, elimination, and murder.

  Fractious multitudes made single

  by false transcendences of state

  and race. Unruly, disputatious, opining smithereens

  and fractions come together over a sacrificial corpse,

  a field of corpses, the earth covered with sacrifices.

  Rivalrous fragments banded by irresistible want.

  Legion united by unbounded appetite and fear

  spawning new gods and false prophets every day.

  Repugnant little pleasure machines,

  mesmerized minions of the marketplace, sold

  desire, sold conflict by greedy advertisers,

  leaving love waxed cold in your wake,

  famine, pestilence, and earthquakes your wake,

  abomination, desolation, and tribulation your wake.

  Violence your wake. One nation under the weapon.

  One human city under the banner of murder.

  One kalpa under the stumbling block.

  One world under the sign of the scapegoat.

  One species under the flag of the goat’s head.

  Well, it’s too late for flags.

  It’s too late

  for presidents. It’s too late

  for movie stars and the profit economy.

  It’s too late for plutonomy and precariate.

  The war is on.

  If love doesn’t prevail,

  who wants to live in this world?

  Are you listening?

  You thought my body was a tree

  in which lived a bird. But now, can’t
you see

  flocks alive in this blazing foliage?

  Blue throngs, gold multitudes, and pale congregations.

  And each member flits from branch to living branch.

  Each is singing at different amplitudes and frequencies.

  Each is speaking secrets that will ripen into sentence.

  And their voices fan my fragrant smoldering.

  Disclosing the indestructible body of law.

  Ratifying ancient covenants. Establishing new cities.

  And their notes time the budding

  of your own flowering.

  Die now. And climb up into this burning.

  from The American Poetry Review

  DAVID LEHMAN

  * * *

  It Could Happen to You

  It’s June 15, 2017, a Thursday,

  fortieth anniversary of the infamous day

  the Mets traded Tom Seaver to Cincinnati

  and they’re still losing

  I mean we are

  7 to 1 to the Washington Nationals

  a team that didn’t exist in 1977

  the summer of a little tour in France

  with Henry James

  in a yellow Renault douze

  the light a lovely gray

  the rain a violin

  concerto (Prokofiev’s No. 2 in D Major)

  and I had books to read

  Huxley Woolf Forster and their enemy F. R. Leavis

  Empson a little dull for my taste

  also Freud on errors, Norman Mailer on orgasms,

  James Baldwin in Paris

  Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground Part 1

  and John Ashbery tells me he is reading The Possessed

  translated as The Demons in the newfangled translation

  while Ron and I stay faithful to Constance Garnett

  I went upstairs stood on the terrace ate some cherries

  admired the outline of trees in the dark

  and Rosemary Clooney

  sang “It Could Happen to You”

  and I was a healthy human being, not a sick man

  for the first summer in three years.

  from The New Yorker

  ADA LIMÓN

  * * *

  Cannibal Woman

  I’m looking for the right words, but all I can think of is:

  parachute or ice water.

  There’s nothing but this sailboat inside me, slowly trying

  to catch a wind, maybe there’s an old man on it, maybe a small child,

  all I know is they’d like to go somewhere. They’d like to see the sail

  straighten, go tense, and take them someplace. But instead they wait,

  a little tender wave comes and leaves them

  right where they were all along.

  How did this happen? No wind I can conjure anymore.

  My father told me the story of a woman larger than a mountain,