by David Lehman
Germany at first won’t save Greece, but really has to.
It’s hot hot in parts of Texas, but rain drowns Tennessee, people die.
It’s the euro. It’s the Greek debt. Greece knew
It had to stop lying, but timeo Danaos, they’re Greeks, Greeks lie.
Canoeing in the Ozarks with Pierre Leval, the rain came down so hard
The river rose twenty-three feet in the pre-dawn hours and roared.
Came the dawn, there was improbably a lifeguard,
There was a three-legged dog, the jobless numbers soared.
Dreamers woke in the dark and drowned, with time to think this can’t be true.
Incomprehensible is something these things do.
They bring the Dow Jones into the Ozarks and the Ozarks into the E.U.
A raving flash flood vomits out of a raindrop. The Western world is in the I.C.U.
Entire trees rocket past. One wouldn’t stand a chance in the canoe.
A three-legged dog appears, then the guy it belongs to.
You instantly knew
You’d run into a hillbilly backwoods crazy, itching to kill you.
Berlin and Athens, as the Western world flickers,
Look up blinking in the rain and lick the rain and shiver and freeze.
They open black umbrellas and put on yellow slickers
And weep sugar like honeybees dying of the bee disease.
from The New Yorker
BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY
Artless
is my heart. A stranger
berry there never was,
tartless.
Gone sour in the sun,
in the sunroom or moonroof,
roofless.
No poetry. Plain. No
fresh, special recipe
to bless.
All I’ve ever made
with these hands
and life, less
substance, more rind.
Mostly rim and trim,
meatless
but making much smoke
in the old smokehouse,
no less.
Fatted from the day,
overripe and even
toxic at eve. Nonetheless,
in the end, if you must
know, if I must bend,
waistless,
to that excruciation.
No marvel, no harvest
left me speechless,
yet I find myself
somehow with heart,
aloneless.
With heart,
fighting fire with fire,
flightless.
That loud hub of us,
meat stub of us, beating us
senseless.
Spectacular in its way,
its way of not seeing,
congealing dayless
but in everydayness.
In that hopeful haunting,
(a lesser
way of saying
in darkness) there is
silencelessness
for the pressing question.
Heart, what art you?
War, star, part? Or less:
playing a part, staying apart
from the one who loves,
loveless.
from The New Yorker
PETER JAY SHIPPY
Our Posthumous Lives
for Mac
The first words you ever said
To me? “I like lower case Edgar
Less than upper case Edgar.” Last night
I gave your book to a stranger.
I do that sometimes. I carry
A copy on the trolley or bus,
And choose some likely suspect
And pass it to them as I exit.
Don’t tsk, it’s not against the law—
Yet; plus, it’s only between the jaws
That you exist, dead boy. I love
Your poems and wish you weren’t
Weren’t. Now, you’re a little air
Lesson, this strange glitch attractor.
Toward the end you forgot a lot.
Apparently, if you overdo
Heroin, later, you can’t smell
Madeleines. Something to do
With the sugar, Sugar? When I rub
Our lucky Krugerrand I recall
Sticking it through the hole between
Your front teeth. I miss beauty.
By the by, who was Edgar?
from The Literary Review
TRACY K. SMITH
Everything That Ever Was
Like a wide wake, rippling
Infinitely into the distance, everything
That ever was still is, somewhere,
Floating near the surface, nursing
Its hunger for you and me
And the now we’ve named
And made a place of.
Like groundswell sometimes
It surges up, claiming a little piece
Of what we stand on.
Like the wind the rains ride in on,
It sweeps across the leaves,
Pushing in past the windows
We didn’t slam quickly enough.
Dark water it will take days to drain.
It surprised us last night in my sleep.
Brought food, a gift. Stood squarely
There between us, while your eyes
Danced toward mine, and my hands
Sat working a thread in my lap.
Up close, it was so thin. And when finally
You reached for me, it backed away.
Bereft, but not vanquished. After it left,
All I wanted was your broad back
To steady my limbs. Today,
Whatever it was seems slight, a trail
Of cloud rising up and off like smoke.
And the trees that watch as I write
Sway in the breeze, as if all that stirs
Under the soil is a little tickle of knowledge
The great blind roots will tease through
And push eventually past.
from Zoland Poetry
BRUCE SNIDER
The Drag Queen Dies in New Castle
Returning home
at twenty-nine, you made
a bed your throne, your
brothers carrying you
from room to room,
each one in turn holding
the glass to your lips,
though you were the oldest
of the brood. Buried
by the barn, you vanished,
but the church women
bought your wigs
for the Christmas pageant
that year, your blouses sewn
into a quilt under which
two newlyweds lay,
skin to skin as if they
carried some sense
of your undressing. Skirts
swayed where sheep grazed
the plow and the farmer
reached between legs
to pull out the calf,
fluid gushing to his feet.
On lines across town,
dresses flapped empty
over mulch while you
kept putting on your show,
bones undressing like
it’s never over, throwing
off your last great shift
where a fox snake sank
its teeth into a corn
toad’s back, the whole
field flush with clover.
from The Gettysburg Review
MARK STRAND
The Mysterious Arrival of an Unusual Letter
It had been a long day at the office and a long ride back to the small apartment where I lived. When I got there I flicked on the light and saw on the table an envelope with my name on it. Where was the clock? Where was the calendar? The handwriting was my father’s, but he had been dead for forty years. As one might, I began to think that maybe, just maybe, he was alive, living a secret life somewhere nearby.
How else to explain the envelope? To steady myself, I sat down, opened it, and pulled out the letter. “Dear Son,” was the way it began. “Dear Son” and then nothing.
from Poetry
LARISSA SZPORLUK
Sunflower
Wind takes your hair
like a hooligan owl
and leaves a deep pocket
of dusk in your scalp.
Love without pride
is a love with no end.
You keep calling me in
to fill up your head,
but the mutinous dust
of the dead yellow field
says better not listen
to a thing with a stem.
from Ploughshares
DANIEL TOBIN
The Turnpike
. . . an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat . . .
You away, and me on the Peter Pan
heading home from my own required remove,
I’m drawn by the window’s broad reflection,
the traffic passing along it like a nerve—
an endless charge of cars inside the pane:
the voltage of the real; though as they go
sliding down its long, ethereal sheen
where the solid world softens into flow
they take on the ghostly substance of a dream
or, rather, what we picture dreams to be
since when we’re in them they are what we seem,
and cause us joy or pain as vividly
as the lives we think we live between the lines
that imprint us and we pass between.
Here, the world inverts. Shades materialize
and cars speeding left expand a breach
that transports into doubles on the right,
and those in transit opposite condense
their mirror selves in a second teeming flight
as if our lightship bus could break such bonds
and matter shatter. Like all things physical
it’s a conjure of parts and energies,
a Never Land of haunts inside the skull,
though saying so won’t prevent this child’s cries
from jolting with their needful disturbance,
or the aging woman across the aisle
from leaning in her slackened, palpable face—
comically, mildly—till the infant calms.
If as scientists say we are like hurled stones,
as bounded and bound, dear, by material,
and that our minds resolve into a mist
we thinly feel to be the actual,
then who’s to say the rock is not the air
it hurtles through, observed from deeper in,
not above. So you and I circuit there,
firing the inexhaustible engine.
from Southwest Review
NATASHA TRETHEWEY
Dr. Samuel Adolphus Cartwright on Dissecting the White Negro, 1851
To strip from the flesh
the specious skin; to weigh
in the brainpan
seeds of white
pepper; to find in the body
its own diminishment—
blood-deep
and definite; to measure the heft
of lack; to make of the work of faith
the work of science, evidence
the word of God: Canaan
be the servant of servants; thus
to know the truth
of this: (this derelict
corpus, a dark compendium, this
atavistic assemblage—flatter
feet, bowed legs, a shorter neck) so
deep the tincture
—see it!—
we still know white from not.
from New England Review
SUSAN WHEELER
From “The Split”
’Bye, kid in first grade on your paddle cart.
’Bye, Lorraine, Outward Bound in the snow.
’Bye, motorcycle David.
’Bye, you bright spirits, born of my friends. Jimmy. Natalie.
’Bye, beautiful one, your father said your pink skin would be tender, I was afraid for you.
’Bye, one’s devoted mother, another’s devoted son.
’Bye to Playboy Club Bill, to the Roxy Bill, to the Bill going aft with the cross.
’Bye, dickering friend to Sonja, I wanted to show you up.
’Bye Dad, ’bye Mom.
’Bye, Duncan’s dancing bear shining, shining.
’Bye, great dogs I have known. Cats. Raccoon I hit.
’Bye to Bob Liberty, you must be gone.
’Bye to the beggar no more on his corner.
’Bye, Ben, sparklers and flowers, the lamp of the music.
’Bye, Barbara Latham, Abinata, Ray Yoshida. ’Bye, Gelsy.
’Bye, Meldrum and Carrel, Gladys, Olive C. ’Bye, May and Winslow. My lovely first cousin.
’Bye to the husband who was the best wife.
’Bye to those I fear dead.
I know you all in his absence tonight.
I know you all in his absence tonight.
from The New Yorker
FRANZ WRIGHT
The Lesson
Say you finally make it home after a particularly arduous day in eighth grade to find the front door standing open and the furniture gone, and wander awhile through the oddly spacious rooms like a paralytic drowning in the bathtub while the nurse goes to answer the phone. True, you were never the best behaved little girl who ever lived; still, it seems fair to say that this is the wrong surprise party for you. A little later, looking down from somewhere near the ceiling, you observe yourself letting a cheap unwashed wine glass slip from your fingers, bending over to select a large section of it from the kitchen floor and beginning, with intense focus and precision, to inscribe a fairly serious gash in your left wrist. That doesn’t work out so well. Locating a dish towel, though, does keep you occupied, then cleaning up the mess you’ve made. And you refuse to cry. Smart move, you hear a voice say quite distinctly. You might really need those tears someday. And you have been telling yourself the same thing all your life.
from The Kenyon Review
DAVID YEZZI
Minding Rites
This guy I know, a rabbi, Friday nights,
on his way home before sunset in winter,
always stops at a florist or bodega
and buys a bunch of flowers for his wife.
Every week the same, a ritual,
regardless of her mood that morning, fresh
upsets at work, or snarling on the bridge;
he brings her roses wrapped in cellophane.
But isn’t there a ring of hokiness
in that? Why should a good man make a show
of his devotion? Some things go unspoken;
some things get tested on the real world,
and isn’t that the place that matters most?
So when you told me I should bring you flowers,
I laughed, “But don’t I show my feelings more
in dog-walks, diapers, and rewiring lamps?”
The flowers, I learned later, weren’t for wooing,
not for affection in long marriage, but
for something seeded even deeper down,
through frost heaves, and which might be, roughly, peace.
(It’s funny that I just assumed romance.)
Now there’s no peace with us, I wonder what
they might have meant to you, those simple tokens,
holding in sight what no rite can grow back.
from New Ohio Review
DEAN YOUNG
Restoration Ode
What tends toward orbit and return,
comets and melodies, robins and trash trucks
restore us. What would be an arrow, a dove
to pierce our hearts restores us. Restore us
minutes clustered like nursing baby bats
and minutes that are s
hards of glass. Mountains
that are vapor, mice living in cathedrals
and the heft and lightness of snow restore us.
One hope inside dread, “Oh what the hell”
inside “I can’t” like a pearl inside a cake
of soap, life in lust in loss, and the tub
filled with dirt in the backyard restore us.
Sunflowers, let me wait, let me please
see the bridge again from my smacked-up
desk on Euclid, jog by the Black Angel
without begging, dream without thrashing.
Let us be quick and accurate with the knife.
And everything that dashes restore us,
salmon, shadows buzzing in the wind,
wren trapped in the atrium, and all
that stills at last, my friend’s cat
a pile of leaves after much practice,
and ash beneath the grate, last ember
winked shut restore us. And the one who comes
out from the back wiping his hands on a rag,
saying, “Who knows, there might be a chance.”
And one more undestroyed, knocked-down nest
stitched with cellophane and dental floss,
one more gift to gently shake
and one more guess and one more chance.
from The Gettysburg Review
KEVIN YOUNG
Expecting
Grave, my wife lies back, hands cross
her chest, while the doctor searches early
for your heartbeat, peach pit, unripe
plum—pulls out the world’s worst
boom box, a Mr. Microphone, to broadcast
your mother’s lifting belly.
The whoosh and bellows of mama’s body
and beneath it: nothing. Beneath
the slow stutter of her heart: nothing.
The doctor trying again to find you, fragile
fern, snowflake. Nothing.
After, my wife will say, in fear,
impatient, she went beyond her body,
this tiny room, into the ether—
for now, we spelunk for you one last time
lost canary, miner of coal
and chalk, lungs not yet black—
I hold my wife’s feet to keep her here—
and me—trying not to dive starboard
