The Best American Poetry 2013 (9 page)

from the high slide and refused to cry. “Stoic” crawled its legs and body into the refrigerator of her brain and stuck. My arms as far around the fridge as they'll go: I pull, pant, I groan, leave squalid grease tracks on our gouged linoleum. The plug extracts itself from the socket, rebounds clanging the coil; the bug driving its blind head forward won't squiggle free. “It has to run down and get quiet that way.” I crouch to wipe my stoic's face with my sweat-wet sweatshirt, her fingers in my hair, she bites at it, flops back on linoleum. “It's talking and dead,” she says, fascinated. Me exasperated. “I'll buy you a new one.” Here's the debacle. I can't push the fridge back. It sits, an abandoned barracks in the pale field of the kitchen. A sigh, trickle, a cracking sound. “Why does everything die?” Her anger. “Why do
I
have to die.” A spike of outrage as faint buzzing not all that furious under the refrigerator fails to finish, as, like a glacier calving, freezer ice falls free.

The poem's narrow shape actually resembles an icebox . . .

Camille Paglia on William Carlos Williams's “This Is Just to Say”

from
The American Poetry Review

The dissonance of women. The shrill frilly silly

drippy prissy pouty fuss of us. And all the while science

was the music of our minds. We fretted about god's

difficulties with intimacy as we polished our breastplates,

darned our nighties, sprawled on front porches

waiting for the locksmith to come and change the locks.

Our ambitions glittered like tinsel. Our minds grabbed at

whatever rushed by, like sea anemones at high tide.

Hush, hush my love. All these things happened

a long time ago. You needn't be afraid of them now.

from
Court Green

Reading what I have just written, I now believe

I stopped precipitously, so that my story seems to have been

slightly distorted, ending, as it did, not abruptly

but in a kind of artificial mist of the sort

sprayed onto stages to allow for difficult set changes.

Why did I stop? Did some instinct

discern a shape, the artist in me

intervening to stop traffic, as it were?

A shape. Or fate, as the poets say,

intuited in those few long ago hours—

I must have thought so once.

And yet I dislike the term

which seems to me a crutch, a phase,

the adolescence of the mind, perhaps—

Still, it was a term I used myself,

frequently to explain my failures.

Fate, destiny, whose designs and warnings

now seem to me simply

local symmetries, metonymic

baubles within immense confusion—

Chaos was what I saw.

My brush froze—I could not paint it.

Darkness, silence: that was the feeling.

What did we call it then?

A “crisis of vision” corresponding, I believed,

to the tree that confronted my parents,

but whereas they were forced

forward into the obstacle,

I retreated or fled—

Mist covered the stage (my life).

Characters came and went, costumes were changed,

my brush hand moved side to side

far from the canvas,

side to side, like a windshield wiper.

Surely this was the desert, the dark night.

(In reality, a crowded street in London,

the tourists waving their colored maps.)

One speaks a word:
I.

Out of this stream

the great forms—

I took a deep breath. And it came to me

the person who drew that breath

was not the person in my story, his childish hand

confidently wielding the crayon—

Had I been that person? A child but also

an explorer to whom the path is suddenly clear, for whom

the vegetation parts—

And beyond, no longer screened from view, that exalted

solitude Kant perhaps experienced

on his way to the bridges—

(We share a birthday.)

Outside, the festive streets

were strung, in late January, with exhausted Christmas lights.

A woman leaned against her lover's shoulder

singing Jacques Brel in her thin soprano—

Bravo! the door is shut.

Now nothing escapes, nothing enters—

I hadn't moved. I felt the desert

stretching ahead, stretching (it now seems)

on all sides, shifting as I speak,

so that I was constantly

face to face with blankness, that

stepchild of the sublime,

which, it turns out,

has been both my subject and my medium.

What would my twin have said, had my thoughts

reached him?

Perhaps he would have said

in my case there was no obstacle (for the sake of argument)

after which I would have been

referred to religion, the cemetery where

questions of faith are answered.

The mist had cleared. The empty canvases

were turned inward against the wall.

The little cat is dead
(so the song went).

Shall I be raised from death
, the spirit asks.

And the sun says yes.

And the desert answers

your voice is sand scattered in wind.

from
Poetry

for Nancy and Bill

Sometimes sitting in a friend's backyard on a fall evening

a thing comes to you. But then you second-guess yourself.

You second-guess yourself, and your grace is gone.

The cat dish is there by the step, overturned in the dry leaves,

the trees here taller than any trees in your dreams. You're afraid

if you stay here they might talk. And these nights

you only want to hear someone say,
Yes,

I think of these things, too
 . . . Nine o'clock, cold,

I couldn't see the stars for the trees, only the yellow light

of the back window doubled over on the ground. In it,

leaves laid with the kitchen. Then a figure passed:

My friend reaching up into the cupboard and looking lost

a little while. His wife bringing in a cup and dish. Both of them

standing by the sink talking maybe about buying apples tomorrow

or what movie or the jacket no one can find. Her hair

was still damp from the shower and haloed in the kitchen light

as he crossed into the next room blue with the blink of the TV.

That afternoon my friend had thought his cat was lost and we

searched for an hour but the cat had sunk into a deep pile of leaves,

lay half-covered and asleep. The cat who was not lost was named

Henry and he was dead a few weeks later of old age. At night

he'd come in the room where I slept, and sit

staring down at the heating vent and, hours later, if I rose to pee,

he'd still be there as if waiting for something specific to rise

through the floor. But life inside the house that night was golden,

though then the kitchen was lonely, the cereal boxes misaligned

on the shelf, a nest of white bowls, mugs upside down in a row.

I thought someone will be left to open the cupboards after

we are dead and there see everything has stayed the way

we left it. Say yes, you think of these things, too. And that's

when the thing that came to me came to me and when I

second-guessed myself I lost what the thing was. Sometime

it might return, but for now I'll say it was nothing. It was nothing.

Inside the house someone was asking, Did you take Avantix

and suffer heart failure? Do you live alone? Are you tired of carpet stains?

Do you need a loan fast? Yes. And yes and yes and yes.

I've thought of these things, too—standing at the window while skeletons

on TV marched toward a cartoon cowboy. It was even stranger

in the silence of early November, away from home. But life was gorgeous

in the house. The glazed red sugar bowl gleamed. Months

later, my friend told me sometimes he'd still mistake

the shadow, the wool scarf bunched on the chair, and think

it's Henry. As if the mind believed absence is a trick. For it

can still see everything. But the world asks, Do you have crow's-feet?

Do you have enough to cover your funeral costs? Ever feel irregular?

Do you have trouble sleeping? That night the wind blowing

dead leaves sounded like a distant ocean, my fingertips

numbed with cold & the lit window held everything sacred

in its church. I saw that light the next day slanting as we walked

through an apple orchard and stopped at the mill for cider.

Farther on, we came to a large pond where pike and recluse sturgeon

lurked beneath the surface. On the bridge was a machine you'd put

a quarter in for a handful of food for the fish. I watched my friend

toss some in the water and the pond became alive with thrashing

bodies, the surface almost writhing with their gleams, the sound

of water laughing all around, and then they disappeared again,

the water like a shadow, deep, blue-green. And quiet. There was

a small breeze, an open field, a white clapboard building

on one side. Things are simple, that's what we forget.

When I slept that night I left the door ajar for Henry

who would come upstairs late for his vigil, the warm air

floating above the vent from some underworld

benevolent beyond his dreams. And when I woke later in the dark

as sometimes you do in a strange bed away from home

in a strange town with a moon and trees, I could feel he was there

long before I could distinguish his shape, before I could remember

exactly where I was. It came to me this loneliness is something we take

with us anywhere and not that we aren't loved, but that we aren't

loved forever. Life demands much less. The fish is purely

fish and that's enough. An apple wholly apple. Maybe it's enough

to be human, leave the door open, wait for a soul—which, if it comes, comes

like the half of the conversation we imagined because we

can't imagine that speaking is only speaking, even to the night,

the way we can't believe death is only death, the way we can't

stand outside a window on a fall evening in a pile of leaves in Kalamazoo

and not count ourselves among the missing. Are you single and looking

for your soul mate? Are you drowning in credit card debt?

Do you want more hair? Do you have trouble sleeping? Yes,

I have trouble sleeping. But, when it was my turn, I cupped my hand