The Best American Poetry 2021

by David Lehman

  from World Literature Today

  TOI DERRICOTTE The Great Beauty

  In the movie, flamingos migrate over Rome and rest

  overnight on the terrace of Jep Gambardella, so that,

  in the rose light of dawn, he walks out to find his saintly

  old guest, Sister Maria, meditating amongst a flamboyance—

  a hundred stand on pink stilt-like legs with roseate plumes

  and beaks sturdy as lobster crackers. Some rest on one leg

  or sit with legs tucked under them; some halfheartedly peck

  at stone—as if they might find breadcrumbs from last night’s party.

  But all are quiet. “I know all their Christian names,”

  she brags under her breath to no one, or perhaps to God.

  *

  I never received such tidings from the universe, but Saturday

  on my walk, checking my Fitbit again (3000 for an old lady is good) I heard wing beats

  and cooing, and then, almost under my arm, one flew up

  nearly brushing my hand—as if intentional—then twenty, thirty coming

  from behind, as if they were pouring out of my back. I couldn’t tell how

  many would arrive, a hundred resting on the branches of a tree, and some flying up to a

  balustrade, sitting in a long row stolid as judges. Why can’t I

  take evidence seriously? I (who half believe in God) spoke playfully—

  not even remembering I had watched Sister Maria’s flamingos two nights

  before—“What are YOU doing here?” as if they were old friends or a bunch

  of my kids showing up out of nowhere. I watched for a while and when they

  just sat there, turning their heads, I went on with my walk—another 1500

  steps to go. By the time I was almost home, I had persuaded myself: they’re

  only pigeons; perhaps hungry. But then they came back, from all around,

  as if they were rising up out of the ground, as if they were being made

  right before me, all the sounding wings, air whipping and breaking,

  their grey and pink presences as if convincing me.

  from The New Yorker

  JAY DESHPANDE A Child’s Guide to Grasses

  Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic

  —Walt Whitman

  Although the smell of fresh-cut grass

  is the same everywhere to me

  it will always be Hanover:

  rec soccer, someone’s tamed

  plot of land neat and tractored

  within a thicket, summer,

  its black flies. I sat in grass

  on bright secluded days and thought

  nothing of the privileged fold

  in which I grew. New England’s

  strange descendants, academics

  in the wilderness, proud, protected, civilizing

  certain verdure into quads. College

  towns are also settlements

  of the mind: they trim the world

  away. Already there was much

  language rooted here I could not

  understand. On sunny days I pulled

  it up aggressively, a child-sign

  for boredom. I am still

  most at home on a campus,

  which means field of course:

  as if land naturally

  conforms to strategies to turn

  the pagan thing into some white

  universal. These specific Americas,

  selecting certain roots, opulent

  with sudden green containment. Fescue

  more precisely the species that

  grew up around me, but

  this word harkens to a rod or whip

  in Latin, the rigidity we hold when

  we hold the land in check. I was

  a weak boy. I played alone, would not

  proceed into the scrum or run

  my kicks in for the ball. The action

  seemed unsavory. I had my mud

  enough. In school I knew better

  how to contain myself. The mind,

  too, can colonize its field

  color green. I still can taste that full

  scent fanned out against a morning,

  mowed and mounded, dotting

  lawns, spilling onto curbs

  like roadkill. Fescue: in English

  the word goes back to Wycliffe,

  in his version of the Sermon

  on the Mount, which warns to note

  not the mote in the eye of your brother

  before the beam that blinds your own.

  from New England Review

  NATALIE DIAZ lake-loop

  , because there was yet no lake

  into many nights we made the lake

  a labor, and its necessary laborings

  to find the basin not yet opened

  in my body, yet my body—any body

  wet or water from the start, to fill a clay

  , start being what it ever means, a beginning—

  the earth’s first hand on a vision-quest

  wildering night’s skin fields, for touch

  like a dark horse made of air

  , turned downward in the dusk, opaquing

  a hand resembles its ancestors—

  the war, or the horse who war made

  , what it means to be made

  to be ruined before becoming—rift

  glacial, ablation and breaking

  lake-hip sloping, fluvial, then spilled—

  I unzip the lake, walk into what I am—

  the thermocline, and oxygen

  , as is with kills, rivers, seas, the water

  is of our own naming

  I am wet we call it because it is

  a happening, is happening now

  imagined light is light’s imagination

  a lake shape of it

  , the obligatory body, its dark burning

  reminding us back, memory as filter

  desire as lagan, a hydrology—

  The lake is alone, we say in Mojave

  , every story happens because someone’s mouth,

  a nature dependent—life, universe

  Here at the lake, say

  , she wanted what she said

  to slip down into it

  for which a good lake will rise—Lake

  which once meant, sacrifice

  which once meant, I am devoted

  , Here I am, atmosphere

  sensation, pressure

  , the lake is beneath me, pleasure bounded

  a slip space between touch and not

  slip of paper, slip of hand

  slip body turning toward slip trouble

  , I am who slipped the moorings

  I am so red with lack

  to loop-knot

  or leave the loop beyond the knot

  we won’t say love because it is

  a difference between vertex and vertices—

  the number of surfaces we break

  enough or many to make the lake

  loosened from the rock

  one body’s dearth is another body’s ache

  lay it to the earth

  , all great lakes are meant to take

  sediment, leg, wrist, wrist, the ear

  let down and wet with stars, dock lights

  distant but wanted deep,

  to be held in the well of the eye

  woven like water, through itself, in

  and inside, how to sate a depression

  if not with darkness—if darkness is not

  fingers brushing a body, shhhh

  , she said, I don’t know what the world is

  I slip for her, or anything

  , like language, new each time

  diffusion—remade and organized

  and because nothing is enough, waves—

  each an emotional museum of water

  left light trembles a lake figure on loop
/>   a night-loop

  , every story is a story of water

  before it is gold and alone

  before it is black like a rat snake

  I begin at the lake

  , clean once, now drained

  I am murk—I am not clean

  everything has already happened

  always the lake is just up ahead in the poem

  , my mouth is the moon, I bring it down

  lay it over the lake of her thighs

  warm lamping ax

  hewing water’s tender shell

  slant slip, entering like light, surrounded

  into another skin

  where there was yet no lake

  yet we made it, make it still

  to drink and clean ourselves on

  from Poem-a-Day

  ALEX DIMITROV Love

  I love you early in the morning and it’s difficult to love you.

  I love the January sky and knowing it will change although unlike us.

  I love watching people read.

  I love photo booths.

  I love midnight.

  I love writing letters and this is my letter. To the world that never wrote to me.

  I love snow and briefly.

  I love the first minutes in a warm room after stepping out of the cold.

  I love my twenties and want them back every day.

  I love time.

  I love people.

  I love people and my time away from them the most.

  I love the part of my desk that’s darkened by my elbows.

  I love feeling nothing but relief during the chorus of a song.

  I love space.

  I love every planet.

  I love the big unknowns but need to know who called or wrote, who’s coming—if they want the same things I do, if they want much less.

  I love not loving Valentine’s Day.

  I love how February is the shortest month.

  I love that Barack Obama was president.

  I love the quick, charged time between two people smoking a cigarette outside a bar.

  I love everyone on Friday night.

  I love New York City.

  I love New York City a lot.

  I love that day in childhood when I thought I was someone else.

  I love wondering how animals perceive our daily failures.

  I love the lines in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof when Brick’s father says, “Life is important. There’s nothing else to hold onto.”

  I love Brick.

  I love that we can fail at love and continue to live.

  I love writing this and not knowing what I’ll love next.

  I love looking at paintings and being reminded I am alive.

  I love Turner’s paintings and the sublime.

  I love the coming of spring even in the most withholding March.

  I love skipping anything casual—“hi, how are you, it’s been forever”—and getting straight to the center of pain. Or happiness.

  I love opening a window in a room.

  I love the feeling of possibility by the end of the first cup of coffee.

  I love hearing anyone listen to Nina Simone.

  I love Nina Simone.

  I love how we can choose our own families.

  I love when no one knows where I am but feel terrified to be forgotten.

  I love Saturdays.

  I love that despite our mistakes this will end.

  I love how people get on planes to New York and California.

  I love the hour after rain and the beginning of the cruelest month.

  I love imagining Weldon Kees on a secret island.

  I love the beach on a cloudy day.

  I love never being disappointed by chocolate.

  I love that morning when I was twenty and had just met someone very important (though I didn’t know it) and I walked down an almost empty State Street because it was still early and not at all late—and of course I could change everything (though I also didn’t know it)—I could find anyone, go anywhere, I wasn’t sorry for who I was.

  I love the impulse to change.

  I love seeing what we do with what we can’t change.

  I love the moon’s independent indifference.

  I love walking the same streets as Warhol.

  I love what losing something does but I don’t love losing it.

  I love how the past shifts when there’s more.

  I love kissing.

  I love hailing a cab and going home alone.

  I love being surprised by May although it happens every year.

  I love closing down anything—a bar, restaurant, party—and that time between late night and dawn when one lamp goes on wherever you are and you know. You know what you know even if it’s hard to know it.

  I love being a poet.

  I love all poets.

  I love Jim Morrison for saying, “I’d like to do a song or a piece of music that’s just a pure expression of joy, like a celebration of existence, like the coming of spring or the sun rising, just pure unbounded joy. I don’t think we’ve really done that yet.”

  I love everything I haven’t done.

  I love looking at someone without need or panic.

  I love the quiet of the trees in a new city.

  I love how the sky is connected to a part of us that understands something big and knows nothing about it too.

  I love the minutes before you’re about to see someone you love.

  I love any film that delays resolution.

  I love being in a cemetery because judgment can’t live there.

  I love being on a highway in June or anytime at all.

  I love magic.

  I love the zodiac.

  I love all of my past lives.

  I love that hour of the party when everyone’s settled into their discomfort and someone tells you something really important—in passing—because it’s too painful any other way.

  I love the last moments before sleep.

  I love the promise of summer.

  I love going to the theater and seeing who we are.

  I love glamour—shamelessly—and all glamour. Which is not needed to live but shows people love life. What else is it there for? Why not ask for more?

  I love red shoes.

  I love black leather.

  I love the grotesque ways in which people eat ice cream—on sidewalks, alone—however they need it, whenever they feel free enough.

  I love being in the middle of a novel.

  I love how mostly everyone in Jane Austen is looking for love.

  I love July and its slowness.

  I love the idea of liberation and think about it all the time.

  I love imagining a world without money.

  I love imagining a life with enough money to write when I want.

  I love standing in front of the ocean.

  I love that sooner or later we forget even “the important things.”

  I love how people write in the sand, on buildings, on paper. Their own bodies. Fogged mirrors. Texts they’ll draft but never send.

  I love silence.

  I love owning a velvet cape and not knowing how to cook.

  I love that instant when an arc of light passes through a room and I’m reminded that everything really is moving.

  I love August and its sadness.

  I love Sunday for that too.

  I love jumping in a pool and how somewhere on the way up your body relaxes and accepts the shock of the water.

  I love Paris for being Paris.

  I love Godard’s films.

  I love any place that makes room for loneliness.

  I love how the Universe is 95% dark matter and energy and somewhere in the rest of it there is us.

  I love bookstores and the autonomy when I’m in one.

  I love that despite my distrust in politics I am able to vote.

  I love wherever my friends are.

  I love voting though know art and n
ot power is what changes human character.

  I love what seems to me the discerning nature of cats.

  I love the often-uncomplicated joy of dogs.

  I love Robert Lax for living alone.

  I love the extra glass of wine happening somewhere, right now.

  I love schools and teachers.

  I love September and how we see it as a way to begin.

  I love knowledge. Even the fatal kind. Even the one without “use value.”

  I love getting dressed more than getting undressed.

  I love mystery.

  I love lighting candles.

  I love religious spaces though I’m sometimes lost there.

  I love the sun for worshipping no one.

  I love the sun for showing up every day.

  I love the felt order after a morning of errands.

  I love walking toward nowhere in particular and the short-lived chance of finding something new.

  I love people who smile only when moved to.

  I love that a day on Venus lasts longer than a year.

  I love Whitman for writing, “the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events; / These come to me days and nights and go from me again, / But they are not the Me myself.”

  I love October when the veil between worlds is thinnest.

  I love how at any moment I could forgive someone from the past.

  I love the wind and how we never see it.

  I love the performed sincerity in pornography and wonder if its embarrassing transparency is worth adopting in other parts of life.

  I love how magnified emotions are at airports.

  I love dreams. Conscious and unconscious. Lived and not yet.

  I love anyone who risks their life for their ideal one.

  I love Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera.

  I love how people make art even in times of impossible pain.

  I love all animals.

  I love ghosts.

  I love that we continue to invent meaning.

  I love the blue hours between three and five when Plath wrote Ariel.

  I love that despite having one body there are many ways to live.

  I love November because I was born there.

  I love people who teach children that most holidays are a product of capitalism and have little to do with love—which would never celebrate massacre—which would never care about money or greed.

  I love people who’ve quit their jobs to be artists.

  I love you for reading this as opposed to anything else.

  I love the nostalgia of the future.