by David Lehman
from Denver Quarterly
LEONARD COHEN
* * *
Steer Your Way
Steer your way through the ruins of the Altar and the Mall
Steer your way through the fables of Creation and the Fall
Steer your way past the Palaces that rise above the rot
Year by year
Month by month
Day by day
Thought by thought
Steer your heart past the Truth you believed in yesterday
Such as Fundamental Goodness and the Wisdom of the Way
Steer your heart, precious heart, past the women whom you bought
Year by year
Month by month
Day by day
Thought by thought
Steer your path through the pain that is far more real than you
That has smashed the Cosmic Model, that has blinded every View
And please don’t make me go there, though there be a God or not
Year by year
Month by month
Day by day
Thought by thought
They whisper still, the injured stones, the blunted mountains weep
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make things cheap
And say the Mea Culpa, which you’ve gradually forgot
Year by year
Month by month
Day by day
Thought by thought
Steer your way, O my heart, though I have no right to ask
To the one who was never never equal to the task
Who knows he’s been convicted, who knows he will be shot
Year by year
Month by month
Day by day
Thought by thought
from The New Yorker
MICHAEL COLLIER
* * *
A Wild Tom Turkey
When he’s in the yard he’s hard to find,
not like when he stands in the stubble
across the road brewing his voice
with deeper and deeper percolations
of what sounds like, “I’ll fuck anything
in feathers,” stopping now and then
to display his fan and perform a wobbly
polka, chest heavy as he breasts forward
but never closing on the hens who stay
in wary steps ahead conversing only
with themselves, their spindly heads foraging,
measuring the distance that frustrates
his occasional flustering leaps so that
when they reach the street, their scurry
provokes him to fly, as if he’s both
bull and matador, charging and turning
in the air but landing in a bounding
rolling heap as the whole rafter
of them disappears into the grass—
where after much silence, after the sun
rises and sets and rises, after commandments
come down from mountains, after armistices
and treaties are written, what happens
unseen in the grass still sounds like murder.
from Ploughshares
BILLY COLLINS
* * *
The Present
Much has been said about being in the present.
It’s the place to be, according to the gurus,
like the latest club on the downtown scene,
but no one, it seems, is able to give you directions.
It doesn’t seem desirable or even possible
to wake up every morning and begin
leaping from one second into the next
until you fall exhausted back into bed.
Plus, there’d be no past,
so many scenes to savor and regret,
and no future, the place you will die
but not before flying around with a jet-pack.
The trouble with the present is
that it’s always in a state of vanishing.
Take the second it takes to end
this sentence with a period—already gone.
What about the moment that exists
between banging your thumb
with a hammer and realizing
you are in a whole lot of pain?
What about the one that occurs
after you hear the punch line
but before you get the joke?
Is that where the wise men want us to live
in that intervening tick, the tiny slot
that occurs after you have spent hours
searching downtown for that new club
and just before you give up and head back home?
from New Ohio Review
CARL DENNIS
* * *
Two Lives
In my other life the B-l7 my father is piloting
Is shot down over Normandy
And my mother raises her sons alone
On her widow’s pension and on what she earns
As a nurse at the local hospital, a sum
That pays for a third-floor walk-up
In a neighborhood that’s seen better days.
I play stick ball after school in the lot
Behind the laundry. I come home bruised
From fist fights and snowball fights
With boys who live in the tenement on the corner.
Not once do I play with the boy I am
In this life, whose father, too old for the draft,
Starts a paint company in a rented basement
Which almost goes under after a year
And then is saved, as the war continues,
By a steady flow of government contracts
That allows my mother to retire from nursing
And devote herself to work with the poor.
I find our quiet neighborhood of handsome houses
And shady streets crushingly uneventful.
No surprise I spend hours each day turning the pages
Of stories about trolls, wizards, giants,
Wandering knights, and captive princesses.
In my other life, I have to leave high school
To bolster the family income as lab boy
In the building attached to the factory that in this life
My father owns. I clean test tubes and beakers,
With a break for stacking cans on the loading dock
Or driving the truck to make deliveries.
In this life it takes only one summer
Of work at the office, addressing announcements
Of a coating tougher than any made by competitors,
To decide that the real world, so called,
Is overrated, compared to the world of novels,
Where every incident is freighted with implications
For distinguishing apparent success from actual.
No wonder I’m leaning toward a profession
Where people can earn a living by talking
In class about books they love. Meanwhile,
In my other life, after helping to bring the union
To a non-union shop, I rise in the ranks
To become shop steward, and then,
Helped by a union scholarship,
I earn a degree in labor law.
I bring home casebooks on weekends
To the very block where I happen to live
Ensconced in this life, here in a gray-green house
With dark-brown trim. If I don’t answer the bell
On weekends in summer, I’m in the garden,
Strolling the shady path beneath the maples,
Musing on the difference between a life
Deficient in incident and a life uncluttered.
Seated at my patio table, I write a letter
Asking a friend what book has he read
In the last few months that has opened his eyes
On a subject that’s likely to interest me.
Meanwhile, across the street, in the garden
Of my other life, I can often be found
Hoeing the rutabaga and beans and cabbage
I plan to share with neighbors in the hope they’re moved
To consider planting a garden where many
May do the weeding together, and the watering.
It won’t be long till I knock at the door of the house
Where in this life I’m at my desk preparing a class
On solitude in the novels of the Romantics.
Do I say to myself it’s one more stranger
Eager to sell me something or make a convert,
Or do I go down to see who’s there?
from The New Yorker
CLAUDIA EMERSON
* * *
Spontaneous Remission
In the rare example, it disappears
in the aftermath—
or in the midst—
who can tell,
of a fever, extreme,
unrelated to the cancer:
a girl’s leukemia gone
when she awakes
from smallpox, a woman’s
tumor dissolved
in her breast after
heat consumes her for
two full days. Perhaps
such remission is the result
of the rude surprise
of the archaic, derelict
malady, most fevers made,
now, obsolete—polio,
rubella, influenza,
things of the past,
of vial and syringe.
And so, why not,
I consider how
I might engender it,
immunized
as I have been against
all but what has
taken this hold
in me. Idiopathic
it must be, then,
something fiendishly
mine, inwrought,
unknown to it.
I could bury
myself in a pit
I will make of coals
and ash the way
my father banked a fire;
I could enshroud
myself in a scald
of steam; I could inject
myself with malaria,
an unnamed jungle’s
hot restlessness—
somehow make
the velocity of heat
so intense and decided
that I become clear
and radiant, my scalp,
my skull a nimbus,
like a dandelion’s filling out
with its crazed halo
of seed, what I
was taught when small
to blow out
like a flame, the remaining
seed slim pins
my mother told me
to tell as time.
And when I wake
as from the childhood
bed, it will have
broken, all of it,
the veil of seeded
water on my brow
a sign there: something
atomized, cast
out, now, blown away,
by the arson that has
become the God in me.
from The Southern Review
DAVID FEINSTEIN
* * *
Kaddish
Strapped into black
there is only one theme song
on earth tonight.
Giant death machine,
play it for me.
Of all the silent killers
none is weaker than my smile
after a tasteless joke,
something I would never have said
in your company. According to my people
there is no heaven or hell
only earth and memory,
the normal hunger
that hits this time of night
trying to picture you
walking back to us
across the strip mall parking lot of this century.
My brother and I, still buckled in,
slurping grape soda
as the same war crawls across the radio.
There are bodies and to see them
is to know they are yours
to forget, to know there’s nothing
that won’t be forgotten.
On the dark windshield
I use my finger to write your name,
I watch the world move through it.
from jubilat
CAROLYN FORCHÉ
* * *
The Boatman
We were thirty-one souls all, he said, on the gray-sick of sea
in a cold rubber boat, rising and falling in our filth.
By morning this didn’t matter, no land was in sight,
all were soaked to the bone, living and dead.
We could still float, we said, from war to war.
What lay behind us but ruins of stone piled on ruins of stone?
City called “mother of the poor” surrounded by fields
of cotton and millet, city of jewelers and cloak-makers,
with the oldest church in Christendom and the Sword of Allah.
If anyone remains there now, he assures, they would be utterly alone.
There is a hotel named for it in Rome two hundred meters
from the Piazza di Spagna, where you can have breakfast under
the portraits of film stars. There the staff cannot do enough for you.
But I am talking nonsense again, as I have since that night
we fetched a child, not ours, from the sea, drifting face-
down in a life vest, its eyes taken by fish or the birds above us.
After that, Aleppo went up in smoke, and Raqqa came under a rain
of leaflets warning everyone to go. Leave, yes, but go where?
We lived through the Americans and Russians, through Americans
again, many nights of death from the clouds, mornings surprised
to be waking from the sleep of death, still unburied and alive
but with no safe place. Leave, yes, we obey the leaflets, but go where?
To the sea to be eaten, to the shores of Europe to be caged?
To camp misery and camp remain here. I ask you then, where?
You tell me you are a poet. If so, our destination is the same.
I find myself now the boatman, driving a taxi at the end of the world.
I will see that you arrive safely, my friend, I will get you there.
from Poetry
VIEVEE FRANCIS
* * *
Given to These Proclivities, By God
. . . bound by sin’s galling fetters
—hymn
And like every sinner, I prayed,
“Take this sin from me” but
the sin was mine, and how to take it
and not call it stealing? And why
place my sin upon another? So
I ate my sin. Like any good sinner
I have an appetite. I could eat as much
as I drink. And you know how much
I like a neat Mark. I don’t think twice.
I swallow it down.
Two fingers, no water.
Once, then once more. So it burns?
What won’t?
Like any dirty girl, I went down
to the river to wash it all away.
To be made clean. But
the river threw me up,
water wouldn’t have me,
back onto the trail left to my trials.
And sin reigned down upon me
like those hot rays of sun that penetrate
th
e leaf. Like the feathers of a blackbird
come down like rage. “O God,” I cried,
“Lay me down in a cool bed
of rhododendrons”
and “Let them cover my naked ambition”
but like all sinners I don’t get what I want, so
I want it all the more, the petals’ sweet droop
like lips, their generous spill over the verge,
the shade below where I might be safe
from the light that did not love me enough,
not really.
All sinners know that. We stumble
enough to know: not everyone rises again.
from Cherry Tree
AMY GERSTLER
* * *
Dead Butterfly
dead empress of winged things
weightless flake of flight
you rest in state on my desk
more delicate and flatter than
this scrap of foolscap you lie on
flatter even than my dad’s voice
when he was mad like death
anger drained him of color
but his temper was gentle
flare-ups were rare
and of course nonexistent now
since he was found
lifeless in bed a cut on his head
how did he make it down the hall
after he fell do you think? homing instinct?
the undersides of your wings
have elongated spots
silver iridescences whose shapes
vary like globs of oil floating on water
your three visible legs
are tiny whiskers slightly curved
