by David Lehman
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:
Politicians put their heads together when they had to, Fredric March
And Franchot Tone gave their speeches about democracy and shared values
In Seven Days in May and Advise and Consent, and we muddled through.
Everett Dirksen, Jacob Javits, Charles Percy—remember them?
They weren’t eggheads or Democrats (let alone beatniks), yet they could
Talk to eggheads and Democrats (I’m not sure about beatniks),
And sometimes even agreed with them. It was such an innocent time,
Even if it didn’t seem particularly innocent at the time, yet a time
That sowed the seeds of its own undoing. I used to listen to the radio,
Curious as to what the right was on about now, but I’m not curious anymore,
Just apprehensive about the future. I’d rather listen to “Take Five”
Or watch another movie, secure in the remembrance of my own complacency,
The complacency of an age that everyone thought would last forever
—As indeed it has, but only in the imagination of a past that feels fainter
And fainter as I write, more and more distant from a bedroom where I lie awake
Remembering Sputnik and piano lessons, bongo drums and beatniks, quaint
Old-fashioned Republicans and Democrats and those eggheads of yore.
from The Virginia Quarterly Review
DOROTHEA LASKY
Poem for Anne Sexting
Beautiful Anne
I had not seen you for so long
But then I saw you again
In the form
Was it Angelo?
What was his name? The other man.
But that wasn’t him
What story is it that will be the real one?
Icy eyes and the smoothest skin
That’s the way I remember you
On walks to the hospital
Light gold suitcase in tow
She too had your skin
Clear and faintly rosy
Immaculate also in white dress
With black headband
The other Anne had kohl-lined eyes yes
Below electric eel lids, Deco crystal cuff on right arm
She sipped her words
Almost Cleopatra
The lamplight on that face
To say the thing I couldn’t
To say the word
I couldn’t say
You wore the blackest clips in your short hair
I saw a pantoum leg across the table from mine
Anne Sexton, your black hair is always in my memory
To see it shine along winter seascape
While I bit your black heart
No you bit mine
No not black
What bit
Your heart was as red as anything
Although even the other Anne’s lips parted were not red
No no they were blue
No no green
No not that. They were mine.
from Conduit
DORIANNE LAUX
Song
Let me sing, dear heart,
in these dark hours.
Let me suck the chilled wind
through the spaces
between my teeth.
Let me follow you
past the trashcans
stuffed with oily rags
as you strain under
the awkward weight
of the metal ladder
and traipse the perimeter
of the house, lean it
against the roof
where it will sing
in the weak, brief sun,
rung by tin rung,
and I’ll hold it steady
while you climb,
my beloved, to the gutters
of dead leaves, sodden
by rain, swarming
with worms and bird droppings,
and scoop them
in your gloved hands
like a wild-haired surgeon
excising gobbets of decay,
pulling the dark muck up,
proffering it, glistening,
to the light, before christening it
a clogful, burning, hurtful stuff,
and flinging the muddied clump
with a delirious thud
onto the bright new grass.
Let me sing of your strong, wide back
and bucktoothed grin,
your threadbare jeans
that slip down your hips
with each stretch and reach
of the clustered muscles
beneath your scarred arms.
I could drown in joy.
Time is no friend. I can’t
love you more and so,
my Ascension angel,
my husband, my hinged window,
my triptych, my good right side,
my open door, my bowl
of foreign coins, let me praise
your raised fist
gripping the slick layers
of our falls, our winters,
the fires you will build
from windfall branches,
the thousands of suppers
we will share without speaking
in front of the TV, our bodies
dropped like rag dolls
onto the torn velvet couch,
my hand on your bent knee,
my life streaming
behind your closed eyes,
your dreams leaving
their tea-colored stains
on my chokecherry heart.
Descend slowly now,
carefully, one tightly cinched
boot at a time, let me touch
the rosary of your spine,
your wing nubs.
Let me sing as you climb
back to me, as you turn
to face me again
and we stand
in a bed of roses and thorns,
the quagmire garden
we have made, carpet
of brown petals, split twigs,
the latticed backs of sowbugs
crushed beneath our feet.
Let me hold you a moment longer
in my mortal arms and sway.
Let me open your mouth
with my mouth. Let me sing.
from River Styx
AMY LEMMON
I take your T-shirt to bed again . . .
and by now it has almost lost its scent—
your scent, as when you were here and turned
towards the wall while I pressed my body
into your body and sighed, “You smell like candy”
into your T-shirted back. Yes, the smell is yours
the shirt warmed by your lean torso, tufted
and delicious. I’ve washed my clothes in your soap,
but that wasn’t it—there must be something sweet your pores
; pour forth. In three days you will be here and we will drink
from and with each other, sleep in close quarters,
naked, awake to heat and singing cells and slickness. But now,
too tired even to please myself, I breathe the shirt that covers
my pillow and dream—our yes and yes and yes opening and opening—
from Vitrine: a printed museum
THOMAS LUX
Outline for My Memoir
The time my horse got stuck in the mud.
(Two paragraphs; no, one.)
Went blind in right eye, took some medicine,
I could see again. Scary detail: when the Dr.
first shined the little light
into my pupil, he drew back, startled.
(Three paragraphs.) Later HS: broken heart.
(Since this happens rarely, milk for three, four
paragraphs); milk, speaking
of which: I helped my father peddle it,
in a square white truck in a small round town.
College, my 20s: I recall little to interest you.
I did cover many pages with writing
and read, and turned, a thousand
pages for every one on which I wrote.
(Don’t see how I can say what else happened then
and be honest.) My 30s? Wore funny glasses.
(Maybe a two-sentence self-deprecatory joke?)
My 40s–50s? The best part
was a child, named Claudia. I could say some funny
things about her, but so could every father.
Besides, family is personal, private, blood.
(With above exception of daughter, those two decades:
a paragraph; maybe two, if I insert
journal entry on day of her birth?)
I can’t bear to write of her mother, whom I hurt.
Lately? Read like a hungry machine,
in a new room, in a house I love; there is still
my child to love, and friends,
and a beloved, named Jenny.
My vital signs are vital.
I tend a little garden, have a job.
(No way I could write more than a few sentences
on these years
under the sentence, again,
of happiness.) If I live a thousand lives,
then I’ll have enough truths, maybe, and lies
to write my memoir, novella-sized.
from The American Poetry Review
ANTHONY MADRID
Once upon a Time
Once upon a time,
There was a beautiful shark.
She combed her long, blonde hair,
And it made the halibut bark.
It made the chicken oink,
And the whale to run for Congress.
A man should never obstruct
The course of material progress.
Yet a lamb cannot but weep
When the kiddies come home from college.
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
SALLY WEN MAO
XX
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
JEN MCCLANAGHAN
My Lie
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
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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
CAMPBELL MCGRATH
January 17
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 FLA CRIMINAL JUSTICE
jumpsuits with the SHERIFF’S DEPT 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.