by David Lehman
A mullah for a mauled age, a Muslim whose memory goes back farther than the Balfour Declaration.
You may remember me as the grandfather who guided the gaze of a six-year-old Omar Khayyám to the constellations.
Also maybe as the inmate of a Cairo jail who took the top bunk and shouted down at Sayyid Qutb to please please please shut up.
from The New Yorker
DAVID MASON
Mrs. Mason and the Poets
At that point I had lived with Mr. Tighe
so many years apart from matrimony
we quite forgot the world would call it sin.
We were, in letters of our friends at Pisa,
Mr. and Mrs. Mason, the common name
domesticating the arrangement. (Our friends
were younger, thinking it a novelty.)
You’ve heard about Lord Byron and his zoo,
how he befriended geese he meant to eat
and how they ruled his villa like a byre
with peacocks, horses, monkeys, cats and crows.
And our friend Shelley whom we thought so ill,
whose brilliant wife was palely loitering,
waiting to give birth and dreading signs
that some disaster surely must befall them.
Shelley of the godless vegetable love,
pursuer of expensive causes, sprite.
He had confided in me more than once
how his enthusiasms caused him pain
and caused no end of pain to those he loved.
Some nights I see his blue eyes thrashing back
and comprehend how grieved he was, how aged.
Genius, yes, but often idiotic.
It took too many deaths, too many drownings,
fevers, accusations, to make him see
the ordinary life was not all bad.
I saw him last, not at the stormy pier
but in a dream. He came by candlelight,
one hand inside a pocket, and I said,
You look ill, you are tired, sit down and eat.
He answered, No. I shall never eat more.
I have not a soldo left in all the world.
Nonsense, this is no inn—you need not pay.
Perhaps it is the worse for that, he said.
He drew the hand out of his pocket, holding
a book of poems as if to buy his supper.
To see such brightness fallen broke my heart,
and then, of course, I learned that he had drowned.
Once, they say, he spread a paper out
upon a table, dipped his quill and made
a single dot of ink. That, he said,
is all of human knowledge, and the white
is all experience we dream of touching.
If I should spread more paper here, if all
the paper made by man were lying here,
that whiteness would be like experience,
but still our knowledge would be that one dot.
I’ve watched so many of the young die young.
As evening falls, I know that Mr. Tighe
will come back from his stroll, and he will say
to humour me, Why Mrs. Mason, how
might you have spent these several lovely hours?
And I shall notice how a slight peach flush
illuminates his whiskers as the sun
rounds the palms and enters at our windows.
And I shall say, As you have, Mr. Mason,
thinking of lost friends, wishing they were here.
And he: Lost friends? Then I should pour the wine.
And I? What shall I say to this kind man
but Yes, my darling, time to pour the wine.
from The Hudson Review and Umbrella
KERRIN MCCADDEN
Becca
She says, It’s my birthday, I’m going tomorrow,
What’s your favorite font? What should I
have him write? Serifs, I say. I like serifs.
I like old typewriters, the keys little platters.
I don’t answer the question about what to write.
The vellum of her back. I am not her mother,
who later weeps at the words written between
her shoulders. I get ready to retract the idea of serifs,
the pennants that pull the eye from one word
forward, but the eye loves a serif. When we
handwrite, we stop to add them to I. Read this
word like typeface, make me always published,
I am always a text. Write this on your back,
I want to say. Write that you are a lyric
and flying—serifed, syntactical. Becca chooses
Make of my life a few wild stanzas. She lies
on the bed while the artist marks her back,
his needle the harrow for her sentence. Make of
my life a place to stand, stopping-places, a series
of rooms, stances, stare, stantia, stay. She has
shown him a bird she wants perched above the final
word, stanza. It is a barn swallow—ink blue flash.
He says, toward the end, so she can know it will hurt
to ink so much blue, I am filling in the stanza now,
and he stings her right shoulder again and again,
filling the room of the bird. Make of my life
a poem, she asks me and him and her mother
as she walks away, make of my life something
wild, she says. I watch her strike out across
Number 10 Pond, the tattoo flashing with each stroke
and there is barely enough time to read it.
from The American Poetry Review
HONOR MOORE
Song
Of sheets and skin and fur of him,
bed of ground and river, of land,
or tongue, of arms, the wanton field,
of flame and flowers, stalk of him,
harp, arboreal, steep and rush.
House him in the coil of my hair,
silk of him and open sea, flood, star,
toes of him, stickiness, of flesh.
Rind of him, gaze, of salt and heat,
face, food and blade, island in bright
bloom, bristle, blossom, all this night
lie long with him as dark flies fleet.
Transparent, filled up, emptied out,
here of him, here I find his mouth.
from The Common
MICHAEL MORSE
Void and Compensation (Facebook)
My friends who were and aren’t dead
are coming back to say hello.
There’s a wall that they write things on.
They have status updates. What are you doing right now?
For the most part, they seem successful.
They have children, which I can only imagine.
The hairy kid we called Aper, I haven’t heard
from him and wonder if in every contact
there are apologies inherent
for feelings hurt and falling out of touch—
I’m sorry in the way that dogs out back
bark at the nothing they’re trying to name.
Now the missing turn up online,
the immanent unheard becoming memory.
We have conversations that are flat
or we speak to one another in threads,
a wall more kind than faces posted downtown
when tower dust settled and sky went blue again.
When Leo died we couldn’t believe he wasn’t hiding,
that his laugh would not sound out, announce his return.
What a laugh. Goofy. His. Purely his
and out loud like a dog barking at stars.
Something heavenly. An application
against insults or things that spill.
That was Leo. And he left.
I don’t think he meant to go
before he found some beloved and made
so
meone in and not of his image.
I want to find Leo on Facebook.
I want to discover that he’s a chemist
and tell him it’s like high school all over
with so much living, it was nice, to be done
and to see and hear from you after so long.
You seem great. You look exactly the same.
from Ploughshares
CAROL MUSKE-DUKES
Hate Mail
You are a whore. You are an old whore.
Everyone hates you. God hates you.
He pretty much has had it with all women
But, let me tell you, especially you. You like
To think that you can think faster than
The rest of us—hah! We drive the car
In which you’re a crash dummy! So
Why do you defy our Executive Committee
Which will never cede its floor to you? If a pig
Flew out of a tree & rose to become
A blimp—you would write a poem
About it, ignoring the Greater Good,
The hard facts of gravity. You deserve to be
Flattened by the Greater Good—pigs don’t
Fly, yet your arrogance is that of a blimp
Which has long forgotten its place on this earth.
Big arrogance unmoored from its launchpad
Floating free, up with mangy Canadian honkers,
Up with the spy satellites and the ruined
Ozone layer which is, btw, caused by your breath,
Because you were born to ruin everything, hacking
Into the inspiration of the normal human ego.
You are not Queen Tut, honey, you are not
Even a peasant barmaid, you are an aristocrat
Of Trash, land mine of exploding rhinestones,
Crown of thorns, cabal of screech bats!
I am telling you this as an old friend,
Who is offering advice for your own good—
Change now or we will have to Take Measures—
If you know what I mean, which you do—
& now let’s hear one of your fucked-up poems:
Let’s hear you refute this truth any way you can.
from Boston Review
ANGELO NIKOLOPOULOS
Daffodil
A poet could not but be gay
—William Wordsworth
Don’t you know, sweetheart,
less is more?
Giving yourself away
so quickly
with your eager trumpet—
April’s rentboy
in your flock of clones,
unreasonably cheerful, cellulose,
as yellow as a crow’s foot—please.
I don’t get you.
Maybe it’s me,
always loving what I can’t have,
the bulb refusing itself,
perennial challenge.
I’d rather have mulch
than three blithe sepals from you.
I’ve never learned
how to handle kindness
from strangers.
It’s uncomfortable, uncalled-for.
I’m into piss and vinegar,
brazen disregard,
the minimum-wage indifference
of bark, prickly pear.
Flirtation’s tension:
I dare, don’t dare.
But what would you know
about restraint,
binge-drinking
your way through spring,
botany’s twink bucked
by lycorine, lethal self-esteem?
You who come and go
with the seasons,
bridge and tunnel.
You’re all milk and no cow—
intimacy for beginners.
The blond-eyed boy stumbling home.
If I were you, I’d pipe down.
Believe me,
I’ve bloomed like you before.
from Lambda Literary Review
MARY OLIVER
In Provincetown, and Ohio, and Alabama
Death taps his black wand and something vanishes. Summer, winter; the thickest branch of an oak tree for which I have a special love; three just hatched geese. Many trees and thickets of catbrier as bulldozers widen the bicycle path. The violets down by the old creek, the flow itself now raveling forward through an underground tunnel.
Lambs that, only recently, were gamboling in the field. An old mule, in Alabama, that could take no more of anything. And then, what follows? Then spring again, summer, and the season of harvest. More catbrier, almost instantly rising. (No violets, ever, or song of the old creek.) More lambs and new green grass in the field, for their happiness until. And some kind of yellow flower whose name I don’t know (but what does that matter?) rising around and out of the half-buried, half-vulture-eaten, harness-galled, open-mouthed (its teeth long and blackened), breathless, holy mule.
from Five Points
STEVE ORLEN
Where Do We Go After We Die
They’re at their old favorite bar. The funeral’s over. The question
Commands and divides them. One sees the pictograph
Of the great wheel; another, a figure of closed eyes,
Another, the heavenly throne surrounded by a choir of angels,
Remembered from Sunday School. Scripture,
From many sources, is cited, science invoked
And contradictions exposed. The peacemaker
Among them declares that all the stories are true
But on different planes, you can travel among them
When you’re dead, if you want to, even this one,
And find those you cared for and follow them around,
Walk through their pratfalls and the wreckage
And be amazed again at the poignant bravery of the living,
Then the fabulist adds that you want to help, but you can’t,
You’re a ghost, that’s a rule in all the stories,
And that’s why both compassion and a coolness of spirit
Can be felt on every street, making the best of a bad deal.
Someone tells a story about Jon, who died
And gathered them here. It brings them to tears.
Another story, and they curse his transgressions.
Then other friends who have died, story and commentary
And rebuttal, they drink, they complicate,
They begin to forget the quirks they loved
And the spirit that flows like a river powerful enough
To ignore the seasons. The lights flash off and on,
The bartender is drying the last of the glasses,
Stories slide under the chairs into the shadows,
Speech reverts to its ancient, parabolic self—Yea,
Though I walk through the valley—
And actions lose their agency—It came to pass—
The things of the world become scarce,
And what’s left spreads its wings
And flies around among them, like bats at dusk.
from New Ohio Review
ALICIA OSTRIKER
Song
Some claim the origin of song
was a war cry
some say it was a rhyme
telling the farmers when to plant and reap
don’t they know the first song was a lullaby
pulled from a mother’s sleep
said the old woman
A significant
factor generating my delight in being
alive this springtime
is the birdsong
that like a sweeping mesh has captured me
like diamond rain I can’t
hear it enough said the tulip
lifetime after lifetime
we surged up the hill
I and my dear brothers
thirsty for blood
uttering
our beautiful songs
said the dog
&nbs
p; from Poetry
ERIC PANKEY
Sober Then Drunk Again
On the lightning-struck pin oak,
On the swayed spine of the Blue Ridge,
a little gold leaf.
Once I drank with a vengeance.
Now I drink in surrender.
The thaw cannot keep me from wintering in.
I prepare for death when I should prepare
For tomorrow and the day after
and the day after that.
A clinker of grief where once hung my heart.
Memory—moon-drawn, tidal.
The moon’s celadon glaze dulls in the morning’s cold kiln.
from The Cincinnati Review
LUCIA PERILLO
Samara
1.
At first they’re yellow butterflies
whirling outside the window—
but no: they’re flying seeds.
An offering from the maple tree,
hard to believe the earth-engine capable of such invention,
that the process of mutation and dispersal
will not only formulate the right equations
but that when they finally arrive they’ll be so
. . . giddy?
2.
Somewhere Darwin speculates that happiness
should be the outcome of his theory—
those who take pleasure
will produce offspring who’ll take pleasure,
though he concedes the advantage of the animal who keeps death in mind
and so is vigilant.
And doesn’t vigilance call for
at least an ounce of expectation,
imagining the lion’s tooth inside your neck already,
for you to have your best chance of outrunning the lion
on the arrival of the lion.
3.
When it comes time to “dedicate the merit”
my Buddhist friends chant from the ocean of samsara
may I free all beings—
at first I misremembered, and thought
the word for the seed the same.
Meaning “the wheel of birth and misery and death,”
nothing in between the birth and death but misery,
surely an overzealous bit of whittlework
on the part of Webster’s Third New International Unabridged
