Read The Best American Poetry 2012 Online
Authors: David Lehman
The Best American Poetry 2012 (7 page)
This time I forgive you but I shall not forgive you again.
I observe that he forgives you but he will not forgive you again.
Although I eat this fish I don't know its name.
Spirits watch over the soul of course.
I suppose and I presume.
I pose and I resume.
I suppose I have a horse.
How in the world can you afford this house I said and she said
I had a good divorce.
Strangers are warned that here there is a fierce, fast dog.
Whores have no business getting lost in the fog.
Is it to your ears or your soul that my voice is intolerable?
Whether Florinda lays a hand on his knee or his voluble, he pleads a headache
and the narrator concludes,
The problem is insoluble.
from
The Nation
Dorothy Wordsworth
The daffodils can go fuck themselves.
I'm tired of their crowds, yellow rantings
about the spastic sun that shines and shines
and shines. How are they any different
from me? I, too, have a big messy head
on a fragile stalk. I spin with the wind.
I flower and don't apologize. There's nothing
funny about good weather. Oh, spring again,
the critics nod. They know the old joy,
that wakeful quotidian, the dark plot
of future growing things, each one
labeled
Narcissus nobilis
or
Jennifer Chang.
If I died falling from a helicopter, then
this would be an important poem. Then
the ex-boyfriends would swim to shore
declaiming their knowledge of my bulbous
youth. O, Flower, one said, why aren't you
meat? But I won't be another bashful shank.
The tulips have their nervous joie-de-vivre,
the lilacs their taunt. Fractious petals, stop
interrupting my poem with boring beauty.
All the boys are in the field gnawing raw
bones of ambition and calling it ardor. Who
the hell are they? This is a poem about war.
from
The Nation
Sparrow
St. John of the Cross
On the oil spot,
in the Municipal Parking Garage, I am a garden
closed up
  & a fountain sealed. In the folds of my habit;
in the wings of my rib cage;
I hold nothingness like a black jewel.
Fountain of Self, Fountain of the Interior.
I strip to my skin. Dark clouds illuminate me.
Moths fly around;
I am puzzled by the light.
Withdraw your eyes. These steel cables are flesh.
This elevator's silver car is holy.
And the floor numbersâstrung up like lanterns
on the boat of the dead.
I'm half-life. I'm already words
& the Sparrow.
  Listen for me in your throat when I'm gone.
  from
The Cincinnati Review
BASIC
This program is designed to move a white line
from one side of the screen to the other.
This program is not too hard, but it has
a sad ending and that makes people cry.
This program is designed to make people cry
and step away when they are finished.
In one variation the line moves diagonally
up and in another diagonally down.
This makes people cry differently,
diagonally. A whole room of people
crying in response to this program's
variations results in beautiful music.
This program is designed to make such
beautiful music that it feels like at last
they have allowed you to take the good canoe
into the lake of your own choosing
and above you the sky exposes one
or two real eagles, the water
warm or marked with stones,
however you like it, blue.
from
The New Yorker
Broom
A starkly lighted room with a tangy iron odor;
a subterranean dankness; a metal showerhead hanging from the ceiling;
a scalpel, a trocar, a pump; a white marble table; a naked, wrinkled
body faceup on a sheet, with scrubbed skin, clean nails,
and shampooed hair; its mouth sewn shut, with posed lips,
its limbs massaged, its arteries drained, its stomach and intestines emptied;
a pale blue sweater, artificial pearls, lipstick, and rouge;
hands that once opened, closed, rolled, unrolled, rerolled, folded, unfolded,
turned, and returned, as if breathing silver, unselfing themselves now
(very painful); hands that once tore open, rended, ripped,
served, sewed, and stroked (very loving), pushing and butting now
with all their strength as their physiognomy fills with firming fluid;
hands once raucous, sublime, quotidianânow strange, cruel, neat;
hands that once chased me gruesomely with a broom, then brushed my hair.
from
The Threepenny Review
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