Best American Poetry 2018
Page 6
this lens where all the sediments
of moving traffic sink at last
to a surface whose impermanence
holds translucent evidence
of what has come, again, to pass.
Before me—this screen of calm abstraction,
a frieze of captured light on glass.
Behind me—bodies, weight and mass,
rehearsing lanes of interaction,
drinking their sloe-gins and rums,
picking daisies, snorting roses,
practicing Pompeian poses—
at least until the lava comes.
For when it comes, we’ll all be frozen,
some on the dance floor, some in the street,
one in his usual window seat,
each in a pose he’s not quite chosen.
(New York City—1995)
from The Hopkins Review
TONY HOAGLAND
* * *
Into the Mystery
Of course there is a time of afternoon, out there in the yard,
a time that has never been described.
There is the way the air feels
among the flagstones and the tropical plants
with their dark, leathery-green leaves.
There is a gap you never noticed,
dug out between the gravel and the rock, where something lives.
There is a bird that can only be heard by someone
who has come to be alone.
Now you are getting used to things that will not be happening again.
Never to be pushed down onto the bed again, laughing,
and have your clothes unbuttoned.
Never to stand up in the rear of the pickup truck
and scream, while blasting out of town.
This life that rushes over everything,
like water or like wind, and wears it down until it shines.
Now you sit on the brick wall in the cloudy afternoon, and swing
your legs,
happy because there never has been a word for this
as you continue moving through these days and years
where more and more the message is
not to measure anything.
from The Sun
ANNA MARIA HONG
* * *
Yonder, a Rental
Time to howl at the celestial sphere,
that full frontal silver dollar, the very
paintball of pallor and elemental other.
It’s all or nada as noon-night’s empanada
discloses her pretty quarter, the priest’s collar
hung high on the hook of evening’s fluent
wall. Hung like a juror bent on acquittal
who can’t stall any longer, you’re a cobbler
hawking copper coins in an Oriental
bazaar. The Sultan’s power went horizontal
long, long ago. It’s fine to be sentimental,
though there’s no need to bother. Grab a handful
of shine like a disc of doll hair, a dollop
of Neufchâtel,
valor and force, vital—
from Ecotone
PAUL HOOVER
* * *
“I Am the Size of What I See”
—Fernando Pessoa
You hurry but you are late
to every party and dinner date,
so naturally they begin without you.
Like a pale leaf through the window,
you make your entrance secretly.
Now you can shine in the corner
as quietly as any leaf,
rarely speaking and then in puzzles;
in English when they are Spanish,
in cliff-edge when they are hanging.
They are the size of what they see,
swimming in their vocabularies
of desire and principal interest.
You’re a bird too young to fly,
a map without its pink and salmon.
You’re so late you arrive on time,
and later slip out unnoticed,
not even a smudge on your glass.
They never knew what passed them.
You walk to the absolute corner,
where the roof of the sky
meets the limit of the eye
and a breath lasts a lifetime.
Beautiful dreamer,
you’re the size of what you see.
The sky is the size of the sky,
and the sun is just the sun.
But a tree is the size of the flame
you hold in your fingers.
What shirt to wear to eternity
and tomorrow to dinner?
And what size will it be?
You’re asking while you can.
There are things you can’t forget
like the life before this one.
from Fifth Wednesday Journal
MARIE HOWE
* * *
Walking Home
Everything dies, I said. How had that started?
A tree? The winter? Not me, she said.
And I said, Oh yeah? And she said, I’m reincarnating.
Ha, she said, See you in a few thousand years!
Why years, I wondered, why not minutes? Days?
She found that so funny—Ha Ha—doubled over—
Years, she said, confidently.
I think you and I have known each other a few lifetimes, I said.
She said, I have never before been a soul on this earth.
(It was cold. We were hungry.) Next time, you be the mother, I said.
No way, Jose, she said, as we turned the last windy corner.
from The New York Times Magazine
MANDY KAHN
* * *
Ives
Oh to be Charles Ives, who wrote for the future
and lived in an organized present,
who filed away each symphony
in a leather sleeve and took the train
from a garden house in Connecticut
to a seat at a corporate desk. Think of Mozart,
wild with sorrow, dodging debtors, out of work,
and Ives is on his train ride watching trees arrange their boughs.
He hasn’t had a concert in twenty years,
and there he is, beating out dissonant lines
on his two pressed lapels.
He’s not the cat that ate the bright canary
but the cat who holds the bright canary live
inside the mouth. He’s the cat that feels it breathing,
the cat that will not speak or smile,
the cat that godly patience fills with peace.
from Ambit
ILYA KAMINSKY
* * *
We Lived Happily During the War
And when they bombed other people’s houses, we
protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not
enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America
was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.
I took a chair outside and watched the sun.
In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money
in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)
lived happily during the war.
from The American Poetry Review
STEPHEN KAMPA
* * *
The Quiet Boy
The talk turned, as it always did, to power,
Or more precisely, to the superpowers
The boys would die for. All of them were boys.
They camped out in the corner of the band room
During lunch hours that felt too long for them,
Extracting chips and Cheetos from their bags
While they discussed telepathy, time travel,
Teleportation, and the finer points
Who said most everything as if he knew
Most everything, “but you can go too high,
And then what?” Here he hammed it up: gasps, gurgles.
“Can’t breathe. You pass out. Then you better hope
You turn invincible before you land.”
He crunched his Bugle with authority.
“Pyrokinesis,” purred the lone bold boy
Who dared to smoke. “Oh, please,” another countered,
“Hydrokinesis. Since we’re mostly water.”
“Invisibility,” daydreamed the boy
With acne so persistent and intense—
His face pink, amber-grainy, strafed with strips
Of peeling skin—he seemed a poorly made
Piñata, “I’d pick that one. Just imagine
The things you’d see!” The boys all paused then, lost
In puffs and pallors none of them had seen
Except online. One wiped his salty fingers
Across his jeans. Another gulped his Crush.
The quiet boy, as usual, said nothing.
Invisibility? Dumb. Just plain dumb.
Why choose a power you already had?
from Birmingham Poetry Review
DONIKA KELLY
* * *
Love Poem: Chimera
I thought myself lion and serpent. Thought
myself body enough for two, for we.
Found comfort in never being lonely.
What burst from my back, from my bones, what lived
along the ridge from crown to crown, from mane
to forked tongue beneath the skin. What clamor
we made in the birthing. What hiss and rumble
at the splitting, at the horns and beard,
at the glottal bleat. What bridges our back.
What strong neck, what bright eye. What menagerie
are we. What we’ve made of ourselves.
from Gulf Coast
SUJI KWOCK KIM
* * *
Sono
Out of albumen and blood, out of amniotic brine,
placental sea-swell, trough, salt-spume and foam,
you came to us infinitely far, little traveler, from the other world—
skull-keel and heel-hull socketed to pelvic cradle,
rib-rigging, bowsprit-spine, driftwood-bone,
the ship of you scudding wave after wave of what-might-never-have-been.
Memory, stay faithful to this moment, which will never return:
may I never forget when we first saw you, there on the other side,
still fish-gilled, water-lunged,
your eelgrass-hair and seahorse-skeleton floating in the sonogram screen
like a ghost from tomorrow,
moth-breath quicksilver in snowy pixels, fists in sleep-twitch,
not yet alive but not not,
you who were and were not,
a thunder of bloodbeats sutured in green jags on the ultrasound machine
like hooves galloping from eternity to time,
feet kicking bone-creel and womb-wall,
while we waited, never to waken in that world again,
the world without the shadow of your death,
with no you or not-you, no is or was or might-have-been or never-were.
May I never forget when we first saw you in your afterlife
which was life,
soaked otter-pelt and swan-down crowning,
face cauled in blood and mucus-mud, eyes soldered shut,
wet birth-cord rooting you from one world to the next,
you who might not have lived, might never have been born, like all the others,
as we looked at every pock and crook of your skull,
every clotted hair, seal-slick on your blue-black scalp,
every lash, every nail, every pore, every breath,
with so much wonder that wonder is not the word—
from Southword
KARL KIRCHWEY
* * *
Palazzo Maldura
The palazzo library was a retrofit,
and as usual I was book-worming
through the metal stacks that morning,
the photocopier in the corner on its time out
where the frescoes had started to spall,
nymphs and satyrs scuffed by human traffic
as they danced to a sensual music.
But I ignored their pipe and timbrel,
intent on some offprint or quarto.
In the beginning you do not know yourself,
and then there follow years of
knowing only what you do not know,
and the hope (though you cannot presume)
that something of all you come upon
might find in you a local habitation.
I rounded a corner into the next room
and moved aside to let him pass,
another coming toward me
intent as I was, anxiety
and goodwill constant rivals in his face
through the long moment it took
to recognize him in the mirrored wall—
for there was no next room at all,
and I had met myself coming back.
from Plume
NATE KLUG
* * *
Aconite
What’s bane to wolves and whales
and poisons humans
nourishes the dot moth
and the yellow-tailed,
the wormwood pug, as dark
as a slug, the nervous
mouse moth, and the engrailed.
Distinguish milk-white
from ivory, learn to locate
sepals of aconite
from the trail: they resemble devils’
helmets one day
and, the next, the delicate cowls
Dominicans adjust
in prayer. No single apposition
fits, but, like a magnet,
pushes towards its opposite.
When the three-jawed dog
landed here, snarling at the sun
and pining for Hades,
his rabid sounds scattered
white foam,
drool which took root in Scythia
but flourished in areas
of higher rock, crag peaks
where nothing useful
bloomed, and no dust reached.
Now, down-creeping
into clearings, stalks wavering
along the tracks
that once linked factory towns,
the flower’s grown
as inexorable as speech—
sustenance
or toxin, to anyone
who wanders close.
from Raritan
ROBIN COSTE LEWIS
* * *
Using Black to Paint Light: Walking Through a Matisse Exhibit Thinking about the Arctic and Matthew Henson
“The light range was so narrow if you exposed film for a white kid, the black kid sitting next to him would be rendered invisible except for the whites of his eyes and teeth. It was only when Kodak’s two biggest clients—the confectionary and furniture industries—complained that dark chocolate and dark furniture were losing out that it came up with a solution.”
—Broomberg and Chanarin
“When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know it is really a door.”
—Simone Weil
I keep referring to the cold, as if that were the point.
Fact. Not point.
Forty-below was a good day. “In short, fine weather,” you wrote once, before cutting out blocks of ice and fashioning another igloo for the whole crew each night.
But it isn’t the point, that it was cold, is it?
How many days before arriving did you sit on the deck in that chair, staring out to sea, wearing a coarse blue shirt, the lost, well-mannered rhetoric of your day
spiraling beneath a blue hat—concertina (at your ankle) outside the placid frame?
Thank you, whoever you are, for standing behind the camera and thinking “Matthew Henson” and “photograph” at the same time.
The unanticipated shock: so much believed to be white is actually—strikingly—blue. Endless blueness. White is blue. An ocean wave freezes in place. Blue. Whole glaciers, large as Ohio, floating masses of static water. All of them pale frosted azuls. It makes me wonder—yet again—was there ever such a thing as whiteness? I am beginning to grow suspicious. An open window.
I am blue.
I am a frozen blue ocean.
I am a wave struck cold in midair.
The wave is nude beneath her blue dress.
Her skin is blue.
To arrive in a place.
And this place in which you have arrived finally: a place you have always dreamt of arriving. Perhaps you have tried—for eighteen years—to get there, dreaming of landscapes, people, food. Always repulsed by your effort, unable to attain the trophy.
And then finally somehow you arrive one day and are immediately stunned because you realize more than anything, it isn’t the landscape, food, the people. That thing which most astonishes you is the light, the way the air appears, how the sunlight hovers just before your eyes.
And you—then—wanting nothing more than to spend the day indoors watching the room. The vast ocean always nothing more than an open window. So you stay inside and choose to watch the same wall turn fifty reds, then later: slow, countless variations of blue. Blues you have never seen. There is a black beam overhead on the ceiling. Without it, the ability to see such light would disappear. The light is toying with you, and you like it. All of this because the darkness is now always overhead. That. That is what arriving means.