Read The Best American Poetry 2012 Online
Authors: David Lehman
The Best American Poetry 2012 (10 page)
Two thousand seeds for the one that engendered you.
Weary of time? I think not. Object lesson
For adepts of the trigonometries
Of Fibonacciâyou
are
time, a living
Sundial, tireless tracker of the light's
Trajectory. You know, you flaming thing,
You august standard-bearer for the skies
In their last and greatest clarity before
The cloudy season, you know there is nothing
Random in the way a space is filled.
Nothing ever doesn't make sense. We
Can do the math: each thing will always be
The sum of things that came before it. Write
This message in the borders of the garden:
Phi,
the symbol of the mean you mean,
The disc atop the slim stalk. Yes, and fie,
By the way, on any and all who'd think to call
You weary of time, who'd wrongly reify
Those bending rays, that reverent chin-to-chest
Kowtow. You know of mortal gravity,
Sun-worshipper, you pythia of pith
And oil, you oracle of harmony,
Order and reason. Of course you bow to it.
from
New England Review
One Train's Survival Depends on the Other Derailed
after Susan Mitchell
In a bar in Chicago like a bar in New York, the anthems hang
in the jukebox air:
I Will Survive, Maybe This Time,
the bartender's nipple ring catching the discoball's shrapnel light,
on a night which begins in wan November, dancing
with a chestnut-haired Aries, the scorch of us hurtling like a train
I want to step in front of. He takes my hand when we leave the bar,
we walk a greasy sidewalk to a private courtyard, he kisses me
and the world goes magnolia, quick white flash back
to the garden I hid in as a boy, interred in a noiseless mangle,
the tree's opalescent sepals masking my upturned face
as I imagine a real life GI Joe come to the rescue, smiling down
into the plot, shovel in hand. He kisses me on a night
so rinsed in purity it begs for its own ending.
The night's begging lodged in me. We're parallel trains
lurching forward, jaunting windows jaggedly aligned.
Don't love the train, it craves to be emptied.
When we part, a February starfield blooming above us
in the dead of winter, he's wiping the kiss off his lips.
Don't miss me,
he says, hailing a cab, paying the driver,
saying goodbye with a sterile hug. I miss the stars,
which had leaned in close. In November, I could die
happy, his saliva drying on my neck, the breeze
violining its song along the sloped avenue.
The song expires on the radio of an overheated car
speeding eastward into the night after the secret courtyard,
after the snow lowered its gentle hammer on the skulls
of lovers, the night I know in my sudden blood
I am going to kill myself. Don't miss me,
the discoball moon says to the lake. Don't miss me
says a boy to the plastic partition, the snow melting
down his face in tracks, in February, on a night
stricken at last of starlight, shocked dumb,
night with its shovel and its covering dark.
from
New England Review
The Rose Has Teeth
after Matmos & M. Zapruder
I was trying to play the twelve-bar blues with two bars.
I was trying to fill the room with a shocked and awkward color,
I was trying to limber your shuffle, the muscle wired to muscle.
I wanted to be a lucid hammer. I was trying to play
like the first mechanic asked to repair the first automobile.
Once, Piano, every man-made song could fit in your mouth.
But I was trying to play Burial's “Ghost Hardware.”
I was trying to play “Steam and Sequins for Larry Levan”
without the artificial bells and smoke. I was trying to play
the sound of applause by trying to play the sound of rain.
I was trying to mimic the stain on a bed, the sound
of a woman's soft, contracting bellow, the answer to who I am.
Before I trust the god who makes me rot, I trust you, Piano.
Something deathless fills your wood. Because I wanted to be
invisible, I was trying to play like a woman blacker
than an unpaid light bill, like a white boy lost in the snow.
I wanted to be a ghost because the skull is just a few holes
covered in meat. The skin has no teeth. I was trying to play
the sound of a shattered window. I was trying to play what I felt
singing in the mirror as a boy. I was trying to play what I overheard:
the old questions, the hunger, the rattle of spines. The body
that only loves what it can touch always turns to dust.
What would a mother feel if her child sang “Sometimes I Feel
Like a Motherless Child” too beautifully? A hole has no teeth.
A bird has no teeth. But you got teeth, Piano. You make me high.
You make me dance as only a sail can dance its ragged assailable
dance. You make me believe there is good in me.
I was trying to play “California Dreaming” with José Feliciano's
warble. I was trying to play it the way George Benson played it
on the guitar his daddy made him at the end of the war. My lady,
she dreams of Chicago. I was trying to play “Mouhamadou Bamba”
like a band of Africans named after a tree. A tree has no teeth.
A horn has no teeth. Don't chew, Piano. Don't chew, sing to me
you fine-ass lounging harp. You fancy engine doing other people's
work. I was trying to play the sound of an empty house
because that's how I get by when the darkness in my body
starts to bleed. I was trying to play “Autumn Leaves”
because that's what my lady's falling dress sounds like to me.
Before you, Piano, I was just a rap of knuckles on the sill. I am filled
with the sound of her breathing and only you can bring it out of me.
from
Tin House
Collision
Away in the eyefar
nightrise over the sapwood, and one likes
under hooves the heatfeel after sun flees, heat stays on this
smooth to the hoof hardpan, part trail
part saltlick now as snowlast moults back
into the sapwood
to yard and rot
and one sees moonrise mounding
over a groundswell, but too soon and swifter
like never the moon one knows, no moon at all,
two
moons fawned, both small, too hot, they
come with a growling and
hold one fast, so chafing for flight
but what, what, what, what
wonderingââ
and one can't move and can't although one
knows from backdays, eared and glimpsed
through sapwood  budwood  cracklewood  bonewood
flashes of this same Wolfing
now upon one, still
stalls the hooves on the saltlick and the eyebright
creature squeals  afraid?ââand one somehow
uphoofed in a bound not chosen high as if to flee with no
trying, no feeling, fallen  flankflat, fawnlike
eyes above in the eyefar closing small
with the world
and now from the stopped thing
comes what  its cub?  legged up on its hinds,
kneels low to touch, but in that awful
touch, no feel  no fear to feel
no at allâ
from
The Literary Review
