by David Lehman
your head a majestic black seed
I fetch my magnifying glass
to view your life form
so difficult to glimpse
except fleetingly while in motion
for twelve days I have selfishly kept you
for private study on a corner of my desk
you seem a saint
remaining uncorrupt obligingly intact
perhaps your oranges yellows and blacks
are imperceptibly dimming
but I can’t see it yet you look fresh
I long to pet you but know
you would crumble to dust
like pollen on my fingertips
dead monarch will you ferry
my dead father a missive in which I admit
he was right about everything:
my cousin’s sham marriage
and 9/11 about how one should never eat
a loveless meal about craving more time
alive about the eternity of our ends?
from Fifth Wednesday
REGINALD GIBBONS
* * *
Canasta
Houston, 1953
Masses of one un-housed
household added to another, all abandoned and made
to abandon their names. A non-colonnade
of gray clods. An un-quadrangle
of neo-rational obliteration. An arcade
of ashes. Ditch-buried
hordes of kin left akimbo, a strangled
necropolis on the verge of the farthest acres of the settled
precincts of our planet—or maybe at the corner angle
of the poisoned field
of remembrance, only one little creaking shed.
And in the low gray corner inside, a weak tangle
of the last echoes of a last word
that ever was uttered to a beloved child,
or of that child’s reply. “I know how to play,” I said
to my grandmother, I lied—
so wanting to be included, and interrupting her card
game in America—the card table, the discard,
the talk in their languages, the tea—no more than a decade
after all that hate-whipped
grief without a shroud.
Her three card-playing women friends, as displaced
as she, did not (I remember this) like to be interrupted.
It might be too much for me to say I understand
that what they did,
their canasta and bridge, their mahjong, they did
so as, even then, not to be destroyed.
And they went out together, too—converged
with fellow Theosophists and singers and even tramped
off in pants to a mossy, snakey wood
to see a migrating bird.
If, as I stood near the card game, my grandmother reached
and touched my head—
I’m saying: if she did, I don’t remember that she did.
Her own youngest son had gone all the way back there to be killed
in that war. If touch me she did,
it might have been because I, her blood-
descendant but knowing nothing—could
not have restored
to her for one second—
even if unwittingly I could have touched
her with the grace of a small child—
I could not have restored
“one iota,” as she used to say, of the world
that had been obliterated, world
she never once mentioned.
from Ploughshares
MARGARET GIBSON
* * *
Passage
Once in sunlight I pinned to the clothesline a cotton sheet, a plane of light
sheer as the mind of God,
before we imagined that mind creased by a single word.
With my hand I smoothed any rivel, any shirr, any suggestion of pleat or furrow.
Whatever it was I wanted from that moment, I can’t say. It failed to edify.
Nor did I bow.
And yet the memory holds, and there is a joy that recurs in me much as the scent
of summer abides in air dried sheets I unfold long after,
lying down in them as one might in a meadow,
as one might with a lover, as one might court the Infinite, however long it takes.
from The Southern Review
ARACELIS GIRMAY
* * *
from The Black Maria
after Neil deGrasse Tyson, black astrophysicist & director of the Hayden Planetarium, born in 1958, New York City. In his youth, deGrasse Tyson was confronted by police on more than one occasion when he was on his way to study stars.
“I’ve known that I’ve wanted to do astrophysics since I was nine years old, a first visit to the Hayden Planetarium. . . . So I got to see how the world around me reacted to my expression of these ambitions. And all I can say is, the fact that I wanted to be a scientist, an astrophysicist, was, hands down, the path of most resistance. . . . Anytime I expressed this interest teachers would say, Don’t you want to be an athlete? Or, Don’t you wanna . . . I wanted to become something that was outside of the paradigms of expectation of the people in power. . . . And I look behind me and say, Well, where are the others who might have been this? And they’re not there. And I wonder, What is [the thing] on the tracks that I happened to survive and others did not? Simply because of the forces that prevented it. At every turn. At every turn.”
—NdT, The Center for Inquiry, 2007
Body of space. Body of dark.
Body of light.
The Skyview apartments
circa 1973, a boy is
kneeling on the rooftop, a boy who
(it is important
to mention here his skin
is brown) prepares his telescope,
the weights & rods,
to better see the moon. His neighbor
(it is important to mention here
that she is white) calls the police
because she suspects the brown boy
of something, she does not know
what at first, then turns,
with her white looking,
his telescope into a gun,
his duffel into a bag of objects
thieved from the neighbors’ houses
(maybe even hers) & the police
(it is important to mention
that statistically they
are also white) arrive to find
the boy who has been turned, by now,
into “the suspect,” on the roof
with a long, black lens, which is,
in the neighbor’s mind, a weapon &
depending on who you are, reading this,
you know that the boy is in grave danger,
& you might have known
somewhere quiet in your gut,
you might have worried for him
in the white space between lines 5 & 6,
or maybe even earlier, & you might be holding
your breath for him right now
because you know this story,
it’s a true story, though,
miraculously, in this version
of the story anyway,
the boy on the roof of the Skyview lives
to tell the police that he is studying
the night & moon & lives
long enough to offer them (the cops) a view
through his telescope’s long, black eye, which,
if I am spelling it out anyway,
is the instrument he borrowed
& the beautiful “trouble” he went through
lugging it up to the roof
to better see the leopard body of
&n
bsp; space speckled with stars & the moon far off,
much farther than (since I am spelling The Thing
out) the distance between
the white neighbor who cannot see the boy
who is her neighbor, who,
in fact, is much nearer
to her than to the moon, the boy who
wants to understand the large
& gloriously un-human mysteries of
the galaxy, the boy who, despite “America,”
has not been killed by the murderous jury of
his neighbor’s imagination & wound. This poem
wants only the moon in its hair & the boy on the roof.
This boy on the roof of this poem
with a moon in his heart. Inside my own body
as I write this poem my body
is making a boy even as the radio
calls out the Missouri coroner’s news,
the Ohio coroner’s news.
2015. My boy will nod
for his milk & close his mouth around
the black eye of my nipple.
We will survive. How did it happen?
The boy. The cops. My body in this poem.
My milk pulling down into droplets of light
as the baby drinks & drinks them down
into the body that is his own, see it,
splayed & sighing as a star in my arms.
Maybe he will be the boy who studies stars.
Maybe he will be (say it)
the boy on the coroner’s table
splayed & spangled
by an officer’s lead as if he, too, weren’t made
of a trillion glorious cells & sentences. Trying to last.
Leadless, remember? The body’s beginning,
splendored with breaths, turned,
by time, into, at least, this song.
This moment-made & the mackerel-“soul”
caught flashing inside the brief moment of the body’s net,
then, whoosh, back into the sea of space.
The poem dreams of bodies always leadless, bearing
only things ordinary
as water & light.
from Harvard Review
JEFFREY HARRISON
* * *
Higher Education
Antioch, Berkeley, and Columbia
were the ABC’s of colleges
my father said he wouldn’t pay for—
breeding grounds for radicalism
he called them, as if their campuses
were giant Petri dishes spawning
toxic cultures. Our own pathology
was pretty toxic at the time, both of us
stubbornly refusing to learn
anything about each other, or
about ourselves for that matter, stuck
in a rudimentary pattern of
defining ourselves as opposites.
I wouldn’t even look at Kenyon,
his beloved alma mater, despite
its long tradition as a school for
future poets. I hadn’t read a word
of Robert Lowell or James Wright yet,
but I’d read Ginsberg, and the first stop
on my college tour was Columbia,
and that’s where I ended up going.
And my father, to his credit, must
have seen it was the right place for me
or at least was unavoidable,
so he let me go, and he paid for it.
And the only price I had to pay
was, when I was home on holidays,
to suffer his barbed commentary
about the very education he
was financing, which ironically
had to do with the core values of
Western Civilization. I can’t
remember—is forgiveness one of them?
We both got a C in Forgiveness
but later bumped it up to a B minus
when, in a surprising twist, my son
ended up at Kenyon. My father
took real pleasure in that, though he
was already dying by then. I thought
of him at graduation, how proud
he would have been for his grandson
who, he might have joked, was a better
student than he had ever been—all
our ignorance put aside at least
for that one day of celebration.
from The Yale Review
TERRANCE HAYES
* * *
Ars Poetica with Bacon
Fortunately, the family, anxious about its diminishing
food supply, encountered a small, possibly hostile pig
along the way. The daughter happened upon it first
pushing its scuffed snout against something hidden
at the base of a thorn bush: a blood covered egg, maybe,
or small rubber ball exactly like the sort that snapped
from the paddle my mother used to beat me with
when I let her down. At the time the father and mother
were tangled in some immemorial dispute about cause
and effect: who’d harmed whom first, how jealousy
did not, in fact, begin as jealousy, but as desperation.
When the daughter called out to them, they turned
to see her lift the pig, it was no heavier than an orphan,
from the bushes and then set it down in their path.
They waited to see whether the pig might idle forward
with them until they made camp or wander back toward
the home they’d abandoned to war. Night, enclosed
in small drops of rain, began to fall upon them.
“Consequence” is the word that splintered my mind.
Walking a path in the dark is about something
the way a family is about something. Like the pig,
I too wanted to reach through the thorns for the egg
or ball, believing it was a symbol of things to come.
I wanted to roll it in my palm like the head
of a small redbird until it sang to me. I wanted
to know how my mother passed her days having
never touched her husband’s asshole, for example.
Which parts of your body have never been touched,
I wanted to ask. I’d been hired to lead the family
from danger to a territory full of more seeds than bullets,
but truth was, in the darkness there was no telling
what was rooting in the soil. Plots of complete silence,
romantics posing in a field bludgeoned by shame.
The heart, biologically speaking, is ugly as it pumps
its passion and fear down the veins. Which is to say,
starting out we have no wounds to speak of
beyond the ways our parents expressed their love.
We were never sure what the pig was after or whether
it was, in fact, not a pig, but some single-minded soul
despair had turned into a pig, some devil worthy of mercy.
Without giving away the enigmatic ending, I will say
when we swallowed the flesh, our eyes were closed.
from The New Yorker
W. J. HERBERT
* * *
Mounting the Dove Box
I ordered it for him online and then
I nailed it under eaves where he could see
a pair fly in and out with twigs, and when
chicks fledged, they’d wobble, testing wings, and he
would be distracted, maybe feel less pain,
but no doves seemed to nest, though one flew in
and we both held our breath. Then heavy rain.
More chemo. He withdrew, black terrapin
that settled in the mud and disappeared
while I sat t
here and thought about the box.
That fall as days seemed slow and cold, I cleared
out ivy, watched the “v” of passing flocks
while under eaves, a twig cup, half-hewn boat
its hold, like his, unraveling, remote.
from Southwest Review
TONY HOAGLAND
* * *
Cause of Death: Fox News
Towards the end he sat on the back porch,
sweeping his binoculars back and forth
over the dry scrub-brush and arroyos,
certain he saw Mexicans
moving through the creosote and sage
while the TV commentators in the living room
turned up loud enough
for a deaf person to hear
kept pouring gasoline on his anxiety and rage.
In the end he preferred to think about illegal aliens,
about welfare moms and health care socialists
than the uncomfortable sensation of the disease
sneaking through his tunnels in the night,
crossing the river between his liver and his spleen.
It was just his typical bad luck
to be born in the historical period
that would eventually be known
as the twilight of the white male dinosaur,
feeling weaker and more swollen every day
with the earth gradually looking more like hell
and a strange smell rising from the kitchen sink.
In the background those big male voices
went on and on, turning the old crank
about hard work and god, waving the flag
and whipping the dread into a froth.
Then one day the old man had finally finished
his surveillance, or it had finished him,
and the cable TV guy
showed up at the house apologetically,
to take back the company equipment:
the black, complicated box with the dangling cord
and the gray rectangular remote control,
like a little coffin.
from The Sun
JOHN HODGEN
* * *
