Best American Poetry 2017
Page 7
Hamlet Texts Guildenstern about Playing upon the Pipe
True that. Rue that.
That whch wld cause us 2 mscnstrue
that whch we alwys hve knwn 2 be true,
that we r a part of an unholy crew
that drms we cn do whtvr we do.
2 be honest eschw that. Chw that
fr a while. Msticate. Xpctorate.
Engnder only that whch will elevate. Do that.
Elminate that whch invites u 2 spculate,
pooh pooh that. Untrue that. Undo that.
At least try. Set ur azmuth 2 aim at what-
evr sky will allow u 2 prsue that.
And avoid at all csts the truths ur uncouth at,
squndring ur youth at, growng long in the tooth at,
7 a.m. drinkng vermouth at, 9 a.m. flyng to Duluth at.
Fnd that hue in the sky. Thn cry. Boohoo that. Hew 2 that.
True blue that sky course, that heart settng. Few do that. Sail 2 that.
And 2 anything that wld skew that, u know what to say. Screw that.
from The Antioch Review
DAVID BRENDAN HOPES
* * *
Certain Things
For the sake of my father, certain things
must be done in a certain way:
tightening of bolts, of nuts around threads;
coiling of hoses; firm, instant replacement of lids;
spreading of seed from the hand held just so,
in furrows dug to the joint or the knuckle, depending;
wash it when you use it, never put it up wet;
don’t be opening and closing the screen door
as if you were a cat.
Be grateful for a job, a meal, a leg up.
All that.
In the seasons set aside for such emotions,
of course I hated him.
All things, even hatred, wear away.
In the season set aside I became him,
doing what he did in the way he did it,
hiding the injured heart the way he hid it.
Waking so many hours before full day
from the dream
that something certain’s gone astray.
from New Ohio Review
MAJOR JACKSON
* * *
The Flâneur Tends a Well-Liked Summer Cocktail
curbside on an Arp-like table. He’s alone
of course, in the arts district as it were, legs folded,
swaying a foot so that his body seems to summon
some deep immensity from all that surrounds:
dusk shadows inching near a late-thirtyish couple debating
the post-galactic abyss of sex with strangers,
tourists ambling by only to disappear into the street’s gloomy mouth,
a young Italian woman bending to retrieve
a dropped MetroCard, its black magnetic strip facing up,
a lone speckled brown pigeon breaking from a flock of rock
doves, then landing near a crushed fast-food wrapper
newly tossed by a bike messenger, the man chortling
after a sip of flaxen-colored beer, remembering
that, in the Gospel of John the body and glory converge
linked to incarnation and so, perhaps, we manifest each other,
a tiny shower of sparks erupting from the knife sharpener’s
truck who daily leans a blade into stone, a cloudscape reflected
in the rear windshield of a halted taxi where inside
a trans woman applies auburn lipstick, the warlike
insignia on the lapel jacket of a white-gloved
doorman who opening a glass door gets a whiff
of a dowager’s thick perfume and recalls baling timothy
hay as a boy in Albania, the woman distractedly watching
a mother discuss Robert Colescott’s lurid appropriations
of modernist art over niçoise salad, suddenly frees her left breast
from its cup where awaits the blossoming mouth of an infant
wildly reaching for a galaxy of milk behind her dark areola,
the sharp coughs of a student carrying a yoga mat,
the day’s last light edging high-rises on the West Side
so that they seem rimmed by fire just when the man says, And yet,
immense the wages we pay boarding the great carousel of flesh.
from Virginia Quarterly Review
JOHN JAMES
* * *
History (n.)
“I didn’t make these verses because I wanted to rival that fellow, or his poems, in artistry—I knew that wouldn’t be easy—but to test what certain dreams of mine might be saying and to acquit myself of any impiety, just in case they might be repeatedly commanding me to make this music.”
—Plato, Phaedo
Viewed from space, the Chilean volcano blooms.
I cannot see it. It’s a problem of scale. History—the branch
of knowledge dealing with past events; a continuous,
systematic narrative of; aggregate deeds; acts, ideas, events
that will shape the course of the future; immediate
but significant happenings; finished, done with—“he’s history.”
—
Calbuco: men shoveling ash from the street.
Third time in a week. And counting.
Infinite antithesis. Eleven
miles of ash in the air. What to call it—
just “ash.” They flee to Ensenada.
—
The power of motives does not proceed directly from the will—
a changed form of knowledge. Wind pushing
clouds toward Argentina. Knowledge is merely involved.
Ash falls, it is falling, it has fallen. Will fall. Already flights
cancelled in Buenos Aires. I want to call it snow—
what settles on the luma trees, their fruit black, purplish black,
soot-speckled, hermaphroditic—if this book is unintelligible
and hard on the ears—the oblong ovals of its leaves.
Amos, fragrant. Family name Myrtus. The wood is extremely hard.
—
Ash falling on the concrete, falling on cars, ash
on the windshields, windows, yards. They have lost
all sense of direction. They might as well be deep
in a forest or down in a well. They do not comprehend
the fundamental principles. They have nothing in their heads.
—
The dream kept
urging me on to do
what I was doing—
to make music—
since philosophy,
in my view, is
the greatest music.
—
History—from the Greek historía, learning or knowing by inquiry. Historein (v.) to ask. The asking is not idle. From the French histoire, story. Hístor (Gk.) one who sees. It is just a matter of what we are looking for.
from The Kenyon Review
RODNEY JONES
* * *
Homecoming
One place is as good as another to be born
and return after years, like Odysseus to Ithaca or mildew to a rotting plank.
How Sunday it all looks now, paved and pastured, fieldless and storeless.
Burglar music. Late morning. No one home.
And the past, still and under: its sawdust ice, its milk jugs screwed tight and
suspended in spring water.
County life, pre-telephone, without verbs.
Small houses, a quarter of a mile apart, of whitewashed or unpainted clapboard,
each with a well and outhouse.
Larger houses with barns, chicken coops, toolsheds, and smokehouses. Hounds
of some significance. Men. Women. Children.
Nary and tarnation. A singing from the fields. A geeing and hawing.
A voice here and there wi
th a smidgeon of Euclid and a soupcon of Cicero to
hifalute what twanged from across the fence and the other side of the bucksaw.
Each day of 1953 like a pupa in a chrysalis.
Phenomenology buzzing like wasps in the stripped timbers of the gristmill.
The road out busting from trace and logging ruts. Now and then a backfiring
Studebaker with its doggy entourage and roostertails of dust.
But less and less in 1954, a mare and wagon, orbited by a yearling colt.
The evolution of the cabin to dogtrot, the boarding up of the hall between the
west side’s living room, kitchen, and pantry, and the east side’s two bedrooms.
Stone chimneys at each end, and on the porch across it, the kitty-holed door to
the attic’s must, mud daubers, and déjà vu.
A spinning wheel with spavined and missing spokes, a warped sidesaddle, boxes
of wooden tools, gaiters, spectacles, dried gloves, shoe lasts, letters from dead to dead.
The cellar beneath it all. Wooden casks, wine bottles dusky and obsolesced by the
hardshell feminism of the great Protestant reawakening
that quarried legions of infidels from saloons and brothels and restored them to
their families. Portis’s own.
Tom Portis’s vineyard east of the house, his vines of small sour grapes still strung
with rusted baling wire to rotting posts.
His continuance bolstered and intensified should a client void a decade and show
up early morning, stumble-drunk, moaning, “Virgie, Virgie.”
Prose fragments.
The smokehouse. Hams, shoulders, and side meat interred in separate salt bins.
The hog lot.
The well into which, it has been told, Portis once dropped a Persian cat.
And what is the name of the cat? And what word now from the after?
~
Here are some verbs: woke, saw, stretched, heard, washed, smelled, sat, blessed,
ate, listened, rose, waited, walked, felt, shat, dug, meditated, buried, gone
though somewhere, perhaps by some odd fractal of the principle of the
conservation of matter, a remnant of the original template holds.
Home odor, unreconstructed, peasant, third world—
“Nostalgia of the infinite,” the nearly forgotten Bob Watson called it.
Maybe it’s just like that. Maybe it’s exactly what they say
after years to the old when they were children.
from The Kenyon Review
FADY JOUDAH
* * *
Progress Notes
The age of portrait is drugged. Beauty
is symmetry so rare it’s a mystery.
My left eye is smaller than my right,
my big mouth shows my nice teeth perfectly
aligned like Muslims in prayer.
My lips are an accordion. Each sneeze
a facial thumbprint. One corner
of my mouth hangs downward when I want
to hold a guffaw hostage. Bell’s Palsy perhaps
or what Mark Twain said about steamboat piloting,
that a doctor’s unable to look upon the blush
in a young beauty’s face without thinking
it could be a fever, a malar rash,
a butterfly announcing a wolf. Can I lie
face down now as cadavers posed
on first anatomy lesson? I didn’t know mine
was a woman until three weeks later
we turned her over. Out of reverence
there was to be no untimely exposure of donors,
our patrons who were covered in patches
of scrubs-green dish towels,
and by semester’s end we were sick of all that,
tossed mega livers and mammoth hearts
into lab air and caught them. My body
was Margaret. That’s what the death certificate said
when it was released before finals. The cause
of her death? Nothing memorable,
frail old age. But the colonel on table nineteen
with an accessory spleen had put a bullet through
his temple, a final prayer. Not in entry or exit
were there skull cracks to condemn the house
of death, no shattered glass in the brain,
only a smooth tunnel of deep violet that bloomed
in concentric circles. The weekends were lonely.
He had the most beautiful muscles
of all 32 bodies that were neatly arranged,
zipped up as if a mass grave had been disinterred.
Or when unzipped and facing the ceiling
had cloth over their eyes as if they’d just been executed.
Gray silver hair, chiseled countenance,
he was sixty-seven, a veteran of more than one war.
I had come across that which will end me, ex-
tend me, at least once, without knowing it.
from The Kenyon Review
MEG KEARNEY
* * *
Grackle
What a grackle is doing perched on the rail
of her baby’s crib, noiselessly twitching its
tail, she doesn’t wonder. The way this baby
gleams he’s bound to catch a grackle’s
eye. Besides, birds have flit in and out
of these baby dreams forever. Sapsucker,
blue jay. Sparrow, kingfisher, titmouse.
She just likes to say grackle, a crack-your-
knuckles, hard-candy word. In the dream,
her baby’s black as a grackle, meaning
when she holds him to the light he shines
purple and blue, a glittery bronze. Silent
and nameless. Sometimes he is a she but
always the dream-baby is hers. That is
the miracle. Her nights of nursery rhymes
and sorrow. Of yellow quilts and song
birds. Enough to break a bow. Enough
to fell a cradle.
from The Massachusetts Review
JOHN KOETHE
* * *
The Age of Anxiety
isn’t an historical age,
But an individual one, an age to be repeated
Constantly through history. It could be any age
When the self-absorbing practicalities of life
Are overwhelmed by a sense of its contingency,
A feeling that the solid body of this world
Might suddenly dissolve and leave the simple soul
That’s not a soul detached from tense and circumstance,
From anything it might recognize as home.
I like to think that it’s behind me now, that at my age
Life assumes a settled tone as it explains itself
To no one in particular, to everyone. I like to think
That of those “gifts reserved for age,” the least
Is understanding and the last a premonition of the
Limits of the poem that’s never done, the poem
Everyone writes in the end. I see myself on a stage,
Declaiming, as the golden hour wanes, my long apology
For all the wasted time I’m pleased to call my life—
A complacent, measured speech that suddenly turns
Fretful as the lights come up to show an empty theater
Where I stand halting and alone. I rehearse these things
Because I want to and I can. I know they’re quaint,
And that they’ve all been heard before. I write them
Down against the day when the words in my mouth
Turn empty, and the trap door opens on the page.
from Raritan
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA
* * *
from The Last Bohemian of Avenue A
It makes me sad to look up
at the crest of a building
& see washed-out names,
decals, numbers, lettering
half-gone, muted tinges
of the past, edges of lives
discolored & flaking off
signs, the bold signatures
now silenced & mildewed
a hundred times in gray.
I see them come & go, new
faces with question marks
& dollar signs in their eyes,
believing they can still birth
the Immaculate. But I know
when the heart’s only a big
mouth & the pumping is not
a cutting contest at Slug’s.
A paint job has taken away
patinas of years, romance,
& chance. I have stumbled
upon a thing that stuns me
beneath a busted light globe.
Even if loneliness arrives
around 3 a.m., it isn’t easy
to touch myself because
it’s a sin. But now & then
I must hold on to something
to keep me here on Earth,
in the middle of an old tune
& a new one—I touch myself
as a face blooms in my head
& somehow worlds collide
gently. What set did she step
from, or was it on my last gig
at Smoke? Or, maybe she was
wearing a garden of orchids
when we passed, or the face
of a waitress among changes
in a Trane solo as I almost
walked in front of a taxicab.
When I touch myself I am
reaching for some blue note
on the other side of an abyss.
Mary Travers stands before me
in Washington Square Park
in a silvery dress, whispering
“Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”
as I lean against Garibaldi
reaching for his sword,
& blow riffs of luster,