by David Lehman
I am a valley of repeating
verdant balconies.
from Los Angeles Review of Books
THOMAS LUX
* * *
Ode While Awaiting Execution
Into the mute and blue-
green marble mailbox my dust deserves to go,
though not for that which I’m going.
I deserve to go, and not alone,
because I did not sing loud enough
about this life, this world.
Singing poorly is acceptable. Not loud enough is not.
There were too many things I saw
of which I did not sing, things raw
and eyeball-vibrating ravishing, or worse, things I forgot,
until a pin-stick shock, a creak
in a house of wood waking to heat,
or a bent nail remembered for me.
How did Spinoza define happiness?
Patient acceptance of the inevitable?
I find my self im-
patient. I’m often impatient. Not for the inevitable,
which can wait patiently for me.
So far, the Governor’s not called the Warden,
whose palm has an itch.
He prefers an electrical switch.
My lawyers, having, in law, no degrees,
are not allowed in to counsel me.
Appeals are exhausted, or at least very tired.
So, I scratch this out on my last yellow legal pad’s last
page: I deserve to go,
but not for that which
I’ll lie on a table
and get the needle.
from Ploughshares
PAUL MARIANI
* * *
Psalm for the Lost
Down the dark way, the dark way down.
Everything dark now, as he has come to see:
that the way was always dark, the journey dark,
the mind dark, the answers like the questions
dark, each day dark, the glaucous pearl white eyes,
even when the sun spread across the greengold grass
glistening the bright skin of the copper beeches.
*
Dark, dark, and dark. Because it is the nature
of the restless mind which knows too well
that nothing is ever really known, no matter
how much one tells oneself it is. The books,
the words: all so much straw, even when
they seemed to blaze with meaning. One
more piece, he used to think, one more shard
to complete the puzzle, even as it all
slipped down the drain, the vortex
of the drain, dark, dark and dark. And it was night,
John says, the light departed, the face distorted
in the brazier’s glow. I know him not. Yes,
I knew him once, and the sunlight sang. But that
was then, you have to understand. That was then,
*
before the answers like the very questions ceased
to call out to each other. Yes, that was then, when I built
my castle by the sea in the bright mid-morning sun,
and thought that what I’d made was good, before
the indifferent tide came rolling in again, dissolving
everything. Dark, dark, oh dark. And nothing for it
but to let the wind rebuild it, bit by bit, and lift it as it will.
from Image
DEBRA MARQUART
* * *
Lament
north dakota i’m worried about you
the companies you keep all these new friends north dakota
beyond the boom, beyond the precious resources
do you really think they care what becomes of you
north dakota you used to be the shy one
enchanted secret land loved by only a few north dakota
when i traveled away and told people i belonged to you north dakota
your name rolled awkwardly from their tongues
a mouth full of rocks, the name of a foreign country
north dakota you were the blushing wallflower
the natural beauty, nearly invisible, always on the periphery
north dakota the least visited state in the union
now everyone knows your name north dakota
the blogs and all the papers are talking about you even 60 minutes
i’m collecting your clippings north dakota
the pictures of you from space
the flares of natural gas in your northern corner
like an exploding supernova
a massive city where no city exists
a giant red blight upon the land
and those puncture wounds north dakota take care of yourself
the injection sites I’ve see them on the maps
thousands of active wells one every two miles
all your indicators are up north dakota
four hundred billion barrels, some estimates say
more oil than we have water to extract
more oil than we have atmosphere to burn
north dakota you could run the table right now you could write your ticket
so, how can i tell you this? north dakota, your politicians
are co-opted (or cowards or bought-out or honest and thwarted)
they’re lowering the tax rate for oil companies
they’re greasing the wheels that need no greasing
they’re practically giving the water away
north dakota dear sleeping beauty please, wake up
they have opened you up and said, come in take everything
what will become of your sacred places,
what will become of the prairie dog,
the wolf, the wild horses, the eagle,
the meadowlark, the fox, the elk,
the pronghorn antelope, the rare mountain lion,
the roads, the air, the topsoil,
your people, your people,
what will become of the water?
north dakota who will ever be able to live with you
once this is all over i’m speaking to you now
as one wildcat girl to another be careful north dakota
from New Letters
CATE MARVIN
* * *
High School in Schuzou
They play Ping-Pong. They are all boys. They play
Ping-Pong ceaselessly in the vast gymnasium, will
not stop to glance at us visitors from the West, will
not untie their eyes from the tiny ball. The principal
of the school, salamandered-slick hair, is displeased
the visiting professors are female, leads us out from
the gymnasium with silent loathing to a mentholated
room inside which a hazed Plexiglas cage contains
a stiff leopard, so frankly dead its fur looks as if it’ll
fall off from the stroke of our glance. I have to pee.
In the girls’ room, I squat where thousands of girls
have squatted, the rich minerals wafting up from
the toilet’s well, imagine how all of our urine moves
through the mysterious pipes below, leaves the high
school, depositing itself into the river that days later
I’ll move along with the throng of idiots I’ve joined
to crawl this country as fleas do a dog. We visit one
scholar’s garden after another: here’s the Garden of
the Master of Nets. The rocks are bones of the earth.
The furniture is refer
red to internal organs. Gardens
are traditionally entered through a narrow passage.
Scholars were not girls. Girls are not scholars, though
girls are gardens entered through a narrow passage.
The girls at the textile factory we tour do not look up.
The guide snorts. We have no conception how lucky
they are to have attained these jobs! It’s only natural
they wear masks to protect their lungs. In high school,
I was the Master of Endless Failures, thrashed nightly
in bed, on the verge of coughing my lungs out, in that
Garden of Spitting Up. And didn’t every girl have her
garden? The Garden of Jutting Neck-Bones. Gardens
Pocked with Black Eyes. The Garden of Letting Him
in Despite Many Protests. A dead leopard relentlessly
sheds its fur above an auditorium of children hurtling
toward adulthood. In that gymnasium, there were no
girls playing Ping-Pong. They are all boys, ceaselessly.
from New England Review
MORGAN PARKER
* * *
Everything Will Be Taken Away
after Adrian Piper
You can’t stop mourning
everything all the time.
The ’90s, the black Maxima with a tail,
CD wrappers, proximity to the earth.
Glamour and sweating in your sheets.
Speaking tongues. JLo even. Men even.
You are a woman now
but you have always had skin.
Here are some ways in which
you are not free: the interiors
are all wrong, you are a drought
sprawling. When you see god
you don’t like what you see.
It is never enough to be born
again and again.
You like it at church when
strangers hold your hand.
You have a mouth men bless.
You look good enough to bury.
from Paperbag
HAI-DANG PHAN
* * *
My Father’s “Norton Introduction to Literature,” Third Edition (1981)
Certain words give him trouble: cannibals, puzzles, sob,
bosom, martyr, deteriorate, shake, astonishes, vexed, ode . . .
These he looks up and studiously annotates in Vietnamese.
Ravish means cp đot; shits is Like when you have to đi a;
mourners are those whom we say are full of bun ru.
For “even the like precurse of feared events” think báo trc.
Its thin translucent pages are webbed with his marginalia,
graphite ghosts of a living hand, and the notes often sound
just like him: “All depend on how look at thing,” he pencils
after “I first surmised the Horses’ Heads / Were toward Eternity—”
His slanted handwriting is generally small, but firm and clear.
His pencil is a No. 2, his preferred Hi-Liter, arctic blue.
I can see my father trying out the tools of literary analysis.
He identifies the “turning point” of “The Short and Happy Life
of Francis Macomber”; underlines the simile in “Both the old man
and the child stared ahead as if they were awaiting an apparition.”
My father, as he reads, continues to notice relevant passages
and to register significant reactions, but increasingly sorts out
his ideas in English, shaking off those Vietnamese glosses.
1981 was the same year we vt bin and came to America,
where my father took Intro Lit (“for fun”), Comp Sci (“for job”).
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” he murmurs
something about the “dark side of life how awful it can be”
as I begin to track silence and signal to a cold source.
Reading Ransom’s “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter,”
a poem about a “young girl’s death,” as my father notes,
how could he not have been “vexed at her brown study /
Lying so primly propped,” since he never properly observed
(I realize this just now) his own daughter’s wake.
Ly làm ngc nhiên v is what it means to be astonished.
Her name was Đông Xa, Ancient Winter, but at home she’s Bebe.
“There was such speed in her little body, / And such lightness
in her footfall, / It is no wonder her brown study / Astonishes
us all.” In the photo of her that hangs in my parents’ house
she is always fourteen months old and staring into the future.
In “reeducation camp” he had to believe she was alive
because my mother on visits “took arms against her shadow.”
Did the memory of those days sweep over him like a leaf storm
from the pages of a forgotten autumn? Lost in the margins,
I’m reading the way I discourage my students from reading.
But this is “how we deal with death,” his black pen replies.
Assume there is a reason for everything, instructs a green asterisk.
Then between pp. 896–97, opened to Stevens’s “Sunday Morning,”
I pick out a newspaper clipping, small as a stamp, an old listing
from the 404-Employment Opps State of Minnesota, and read:
For current job opportunities dial (612) 297–3180. Answered 24 hrs.
When I dial, the automated female voice on the other end
informs me I have reached a nonworking number.
from Poetry
ROWAN RICARDO PHILLIPS
* * *
The First Last Light in the Sky
That on the silent horizon, something
Not a sunrise rose, half itself and half
The horizon, dragging its bulk, its lights
And salts, from under shifting sheets of sea,
Leveling the sky into shallow moats
Of sounds, flecks of birds, beginning again
To believe all brief and sideways dreaming
To be, as previous was the complaint,
Lint on time’s black coat, blanketing the west,
Becoming the unfathomable death mask
Freckled with stars, rendering itself
As its other, as though to mirror la,
But not mirroring it, and therefore now
Mirroring it, all sumptuous unscripted
La, la mirroring la like the pricked prong
Of a tuning fork that, for all its song,
Between sensation and sensation is
Still nothing but air, a titan’s dying
Air, a titan’s dying air now again
A titan’s surging flame, an ancient flinch
In an ancient sun mirrored and made
Into la, the void in the voice, the voice
In the void, lala: aiai, song and pain,
Song and pain, song and pain, and there it is.
from The Common
STANLEY PLUMLY
* * *
Variation on a Line from Elizabeth Bishop’s “Five Flights Up”
Sometimes it’s the shoes, the tying and untying,
the bending of the heart to put them on,
take them off, the rush of blood
between the head and feet, my face,
sometimes, if I could see it, astonished.
Other times the stairs, three, four stages
at the most, “flights” we call them,
in honor of the wings we’ll never have,
the fifth floor the one that kills the breath,
where the bird in the building flies to first.
Love, too, a leveler, a dying all its own,
the parts left behind not to be replaced,
a loss ongoing, and every day increased,
like rising in the nig
ht, at anytime a.m.,
to watch the snow or the dead leaf fall,
the rings around the streetlight in the rain,
and then the rain, the red fist in the heart
opening and closing almost without me.
“—Yesterday brought to today so lightly!”
The morning, more and more, like evening.
When I bend to tie my shoes and the blood
fills the cup, it’s as if I see into the hidden earth,
see the sunburned path on which I pass
in shoes that look like sandals
and arrive at a house where my feet
are washed and wiped with my mother’s hair
and anointed with the autumn oils of wildflowers.
from Poetry
JAMES RICHARDSON
* * *
Late Aubade
after Hardy
So what do you think, Life, it seemed pretty good to me,
though quiet, I guess, and unspectacular.
It’s been so long, I don’t know any more how these things go.
I don’t know what it means that we’ve had this time together.
I get that the coffee, the sunlight on glassware, the Sunday paper
and our studious lightness, not hearing the phone, are iconic
of living regretless in the Now. A Cool that’s beyond me:
I’m having some trouble acting suitably poised and ironic.
It’s sensible to be calm, not to make too much of a little thing
and just see what happens, as I think you are saying
with your amused look, sipping and letting me monologue,
and young as you are, Life, you would know: you have done it all.
If I get up a little reluctantly, tapping my wallet, keys, tickets,
I’m giving you time to say Stay, it’s a dream
that you’re old—no one notices—years never happened—