The Best American Poetry 2013 (15 page)

For they have forgotten to keep

The agreement they made to acknowledge

The woodpecker's right to peck,

And the maple's to be pecked at.

Let's have a little respect

For Rubber Duck with a doctorate.

That provocative way of standing!

All elbows and bangles

And hips just like a coat hanger

And ankles at right angles! I like

The shape of the pouring soy milk,

The sound of the splitting log.

But Egret finds it regrettable that her

Sister is dating a dog.

Don't listen to 'em, kid!

And don't listen to their questions.

This corporation's been ruined by

Well-meaning false confessions.

And the world is fast a-melting,

Though I would have it slow.

And I don't think it's helping:

The way these animals go

Straight from hatchery to quackery,

And, if only to amuse,

I'll throw my hat in with Mike Thataway in

Black patent leather shoes.

Maybe I'm just like my mother.

She's never satisfied.

Maybe I'm just like my father:

Always a bridesmaid, never a bride.

Maybe I'm just like my cat:

Licking invisible balls.

Perhaps you'll reflect upon that,

Next time you're screening your calls.

And all the solvent and the solute,

They were walking hand in hand.

This the Indian poets were the

First to understand.

The ancient Indian poets

Had their heads screwed on straight.

Fixed on the body's affluence

And the effluents that escape.

And the influence they enjoyed?

Close-focus hocus-pocus.

And every
gezunte moyd

In a juvenile honey locust

Will prefer their Hindi distichs

To the Indiana Hoosiers.

We're gonna be there from Spit Christmas

All the way to Mucus New Year's.

But for now I draw the curtain

And settle into Lent.

Last person to go to Harvard

Without knowing what that meant.

from
Poetry

The night my sex returned, I shut the door,

barricaded it with a rattan chair. The banging

curdled the egg pudding and for ten minutes

it was all tremor, all the time. There my mother

was, half-asleep in her gender, and there my sister

was, locked inside her purity panoply. And I, shut

inside, obsessed with the insides of me, obsessed

with the open-and-close of me, dead-sexed, hyper-

sexed—I couldn't stop mulling over how every seed

burst, pummeled into pulp, jejune nectarine jabbed

to the pit. Could anyone forget—the horrible panache

of fruit? I despised softness, how a bite can sluice

the flesh with teeth. I wanted to disperse like creosote

in water; I wanted to reproduce like spores, tease

like those stars seen so plainly out in the thawing sky

but nonexistent, having exploded long ago.

So entered sex, who loaded a carcass, asphyxiated

creature, into the open suitcase. We shut it tight,

zipped it, but the miasma stayed with us, angry visitor,

as breath on the cinders, as grease in my hair.

from
Gulf Coast

We are always moving toward the valley,

and the shadow of the valley

moving toward us. This morning, naked

except for a jaunty paper jacket,

I lied to the gynecologist.

I had read in the newspaper while waiting,

having just told the same lie to the nurse,

of Desmond Tutu prevailing on the world

to bring a war criminal to court,

and The Hague, hesitating, wanting to delay.

I'd read of a girl severed in two,

bent as she drew her bucket of well water,

of lone farmers smote in their fields,

and the slaughtered tribe
Fur
,

a name I affectionately use for my own family.

In Tallahassee I offer up my clean feet,

my painted toes, my lie that I quit smoking.

I study a picture of Bashir,

his closed lips, his cheek inclined

to receive a kiss—

how we share the same cosmology,

the same way of receiving a guest.

I own up to my own crime

against myself, which isn't my simple lie

but not letting the world in,

my words swallowed in a private wind,

my thinking too small to deliver me

to the edge of a greater valley,

offering a hand, a sip of water, and something of faith

in language, which brings you to me.

from
The New Yorker

Flocks of ibis on old tractors in cleared fields sliding to sawgrass,

cartloads of corn, or mangoes, or clean fill dirt,

orchards of citrus and avocado, shade houses of the enigmatic orchid growers,

dusty horses in a crude corral fashioned from cypress limbs where the canal is

edged with sugarcane and banana trees by the freight tracks

hard against the
Casa de Jesus
,

convicts collecting trash along the roadside in their F
LA
C
RIMINAL
J
USTICE

jumpsuits with the S
HERIFF'S
D
EPT
school bus on the shoulder, joyless troopers

overseeing what appears to be a collection of high school kids caught with

bags of pot in the glove compartments of their Trans Ams,

security towers around the Krome Immigration Detention Center, razor-wire

reefs on which the rough boats of the
loas
bound for La Vilokan have run

aground,

gravel quarry gouging the template, coral rock pits and barrows,

panel truck offering shrimp and stone crab claws from the Keys,

pickups selling roasted corn or watermelons, pickups heading into the fields

loaded with campesinos,

faces of the Maya picking pole beans in the Florida sunshine,

Krome Avenue: The Third World starts here.

—

Midwinter and we have come to pick strawberries and tomatoes, flowers and herbs, our annual nod to hunting and gathering, a voyage into the remnants of agricultural South Florida, vanishing order endangered as the legendary panther. Sure enough, Rainbow Farms has been swallowed by exurbia, and we must head farther south in search of a passable field, crossing the canals where anhinga hitch their wings to hang like swaths of drying fabric beside the dye vats on the rooftops of Marrakech, tree farms and nurseries on all sides, freeholds of the Old Floridians or ranchitos run by cronies of long-deposed caudillos, ranks of potted hibiscus and parti-colored bougainvillea, bromeliads, queen palms, Hawaiian dwarf ixora. When we finally find a strawberry field it's late afternoon and many have given up, but there are still a few families in the rows, hunched abuelas with five-gallon buckets they will never fill today, and I wander out among them and lose myself altogether.

The strawberries are not yet fully ripe—it is the cusp of the season—yet the field has been picked over;

we have come too early and too late.

Lush, parsley-green, the plants spread their low stalks to flower like primitive daisies and I seek the telltale flash of red as I bend to part the dust-inoculated leaves, spooking the lazy honeybees, but mostly there is nothing, the berries are pale, fuzzed nubs. Of the rest what's left are the morbidly pale, overripe, fly-ridden berries belted into purple froth and those just at the bursting brink of rot—in the morning, if you bring them home,

these will wear a blue-green fur, becoming themselves small farms,

enterprising propagators of mold.

But here's one perfect, heart-shaped berry, and half a row later, three more, in the shadows, overlooked. Where has my family gone? Where is everybody? I find myself abandoned in the fields, illuminated by shafts of sunlight through lavender clouds, bodiless, unmoored and entirely happy.

—

White eggplant and yellow peppers—

colored lanterns of the Emperor!

Lobular, chalk-red, weevil-scarred tomatoes—

a dozen errant moons of Neptune!

Vidalia onions seized by their hair and lifted

To free a friendly giantess from the soil!

Snapdragons!

They carry the intonation of Paris

on a rainy day in May, granitic odor of pears,

consensus of slate and watered silk.

Elizabeth snips a dozen stems

with flower shears

scented by stalks of sage,

rosemary, flowering basil, mint.

—

From here the city is everything to the east, endlessly ramified tile-roofed subdivisions of houses and garden apartments, strip malls, highway interchanges, intransigent farmers holding their patchwork dirt together with melons and leaf lettuce—the very next field has been harrowed and scoured and posted for sale—already in our years here it has come this far, a tidal wave of human habitation, a monocultural bumper crop. And to the west is the Everglades, reduced and denuded but secure, for the historical moment, buggered and cosseted, left hand protecting what the right seeks to destroy. And where they meet: this fertile border zone, contested marginland inhabited by those seeking refuge from the law or the sprawl or the iron custody of the market, those who would cross over in search of freedom, or shelter, or belief, those who would buy into this world and those who would be rid of it alike in their admiration and hope for and distrust of what they see. And what they see is this: Krome Avenue. What they see is the Historical Moment caged in formidable automobiles gorging on fast food, definitive commodities of the previous century to be supplanted by what? The next Historical Moment, and the next, like a plague of locusts descending upon the fields, or the fields descended upon, or these fields, now, just as they are.

—

This may be the end of it, I suspect, the last year we make this effort. The kids are getting older and less pliable, the alligators in the irrigation canals pushed ever farther west, carrying into the heart of the sawgrass the reflection of a world grown monstrous and profound. If so, I will miss the scratched hands and the cucumber vines, ranks of hibiscus focusing their radar on the sun, the taste of stolen strawberries eaten in the rows, chalky and unwashed, no matter their senselessness here, in fields reclaimed from subtropical swamp, these last remaining acres empty or picked over or blossoming or yet to blossom, again fruit, again spoilage, again heavy pollen dust.

No, the Third World does not begin at Krome Avenue, because there is only

one world—.

It's late. Cars are pulling out, mobile homes kicking up gravel, a ringing in my ears as of caravans crossing the Sahara resolves to Elizabeth calling on the cell phone—
hey, where are you?
I can see her by the farm stand, searching the plots and rows, not seeing me, still drifting, afloat, not yet ready to be summoned back.
It's time to go—where have you been?