The Best American Poetry 2013 (13 page)

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

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

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

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

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:

Art as style, science as a style, and intelligence as a style too,

Perhaps the egghead style without the smarts. It's politics

Where stupidity and style combine to form the perfect storm,

As a host of stylized, earnest airheads emerge from the greenrooms

Of the Sunday morning talk shows, mouthing talking points

In chorus, playing their parts with panache and glowing with the glow

You get from a fact-free diet, urged on by a diminutive senator

Resembling a small, furious gerbil. If consistency is the hobgoblin

Of little minds, these minds are enormous, like enormous rooms.

It wasn't always like this. Maybe it wasn't much better,

But I used to like politics. I used to like arguing with Paul Arnson

On the Luther League bus, whatever it was we argued about.

It was more like a pastime, since if things were only getting better

Incrementally, at least they weren't steadily getting worse: