Best American Poetry 2017

by David Lehman

  body against it. Trying, it appeared, to bang himself free.

  And who knows how long he’d been there, flailing. Who

  knows—he and the other I mistook, at first, for a bat.

  They called to me—something between squawk and chirp,

  something between song and prayer—to do something,

  anything. And, like any good god, I disappeared. Not

  indifferent, exactly. But with things to do. And, most likely,

  on my way home from another heartbreak. Call it 1997,

  and say I’m several thousand miles from home. By which

  I mean those were the days I made of everyone a love song.

  By which I mean I was lonely and unrequited. But that’s

  not quite it either. Truth is, I did manage to find a few

  to love me, but couldn’t always love them back. The Rasta

  law professor. The firefighter’s wife. The burlesque dancer

  whose daughter blackened drawings with m’s to mean

  the sky was full of birds the day her daddy died. I think

  his widow said he drowned one morning on a fishing trip.

  Anyway, I’m digressing. But if you asked that night—

  did I mention it was night?—why I didn’t even try

  to jimmy the lock to spring the sparrow, I couldn’t say,

  truthfully, that it had anything to do with envy, with wanting

  a woman to plead as deeply for me as these sparrows did,

  one for the other. No. I’d have said something, instead,

  about the neighborhood itself, the car thief shot a block

  and a half east the week before. Or about the men

  I came across nights prior, sweat-slicked and shirtless,

  grappling in the middle of the street, the larger one’s chest

  pressed to the back of the smaller, bruised and bleeding

  both. I know you thought this was about birds,

  but stay with me. I left them both in the street—

  the same street where I’d leave the sparrows—the men

  embracing and, for all one knows (especially one not

  from around there), they could have been lovers—

  the one whispering an old, old tune into the ear

  of the other—Baby, baby, don’t leave me this way. I left

  the men where I’d leave the sparrows and their song.

  And as I walked away, I heard one of the men call to me,

  please or help or brother or some such. And I didn’t break

  stride, not one bit. It’s how I’ve learned to save myself.

  Let me try this another way. Call it 1977. And say

  I’m back west, south central Los Angeles. My mother

  and father at it again. But this time in the street,

  broad daylight, and all the neighbors watching. One,

  I think his name was Sonny, runs out from his duplex

  to pull my father off. You see where I’m going with this.

  My mother crying out, fragile as a sparrow. Sonny

  fighting my father, fragile as a sparrow. And me,

  years later, trying to get it all down. As much for you—

  I’m saying—as for me. Sonny catches a left, lies flat

  on his back, blood starting to pool and his own

  wife wailing. My mother wailing, and traffic backed,

  now, half a block. Horns, whistles, and soon sirens.

  1977. Summer. And all the trees full of birds. Hundreds,

  I swear. And since I’m the one writing it, I’ll tell you

  they were crying. Which brings me back to Dolphy

  and his transcribing. The jazzman, I think, wanted only

  to get it down pure. To get it down exact—the animal

  wracking itself against a car’s steel door, the animals

  in the trees reporting, the animals we make of ourselves

  and one another. Flailing, failing. Stay with me now.

  Days after the dustup, my parents took me to the park.

  And in this park was a pond, and in this pond were birds.

  Not sparrows, but swans. And my father spread a blanket

  and brought from a basket some apples and a paring knife.

  Summertime. My mother wore sunglasses. And long sleeves.

  My father, now sober, cursed himself for leaving the radio.

  But my mother forgave him, and said, as she caressed

  the back of his hand, that we could just listen to the swans.

  And we listened. And I watched. Two birds coupling,

  one beating its wings as it mounted the other. Summer,

  1977. I listened. And watched. When my parents made love

  late into that night, I covered my ears in the next room,

  scanning the encyclopedia for swans. It meant nothing to me—

  then, at least—but did you know the collective noun

  for swans is a lamentation? And is a lamentation not

  its own species of song? What a woman wails, punch drunk

  in the street? Or what a widow might sing, learning her man

  was drowned by swans? A lamentation of them? Imagine

  the capsized boat, the panicked man, struck about the eyes,

  nose, and mouth each time he comes up for air. Imagine

  the birds coasting away and the waters suddenly calm.

  Either trumpet swans or mutes. The dead man’s wife

  running for help, crying to any who’d listen. A lamentation.

  And a city busy saving itself. I’m digressing, sure. But

  did you know that to digress means to stray from the flock?

  When I left my parents’ house, I never looked back. By which

  I mean I made like a god and disappeared. As when I left

  the sparrows. And the copulating swans. As when someday

  I’ll leave this city. Its every flailing, its every animal song.

  from Poetry

  JOYCE CAROL OATES

  * * *

  To Marlon Brando in Hell

  Because you suffocated your beauty in fat.

  Because you made of our adoration, mockery.

  Because you were the predator male, without remorse.

  Because you were the greatest of our actors, and you threw away greatness like trash.

  Because you could not take seriously what others took as their lives.

  Because in this you made mockery of our lives.

  Because you died encased in fat

  And even then, you’d lived too long.

  Because you loathed yourself, and made of yourself a loathsome person.

  Because the wheelchair paraplegic of The Men was made to suffocate in the fat of the bloated Kurtz.

  Because your love was carelessly sown, debris tossed from a speeding vehicle.

  And because you loved both men and women, except not enough.

  Because the slow suicide of self-disgust is horrible to us, and fascinating

  as the collapse of tragedy into farce is fascinating

  and the monstrousness of festered beauty.

  Because you lured a girl of fifteen to deceive her parents on a wintry-dark December school day, 1953.

  Because you lured this girl to lie about where she was going, what she was doing, in the most reckless act of her young life.

  Because you lured this girl to take a Greyhound bus from Williamsville, New York to downtown Buffalo, New York, alone in the wintry dusk, as she had not ever been alone in her previous life.

  Because you lured this girl shivering, daring to step onto the bus in front of Williamsville High School at 4:55 PM to be taken twelve miles to the small shabby second-run Main Street Cinema for a 6 PM showing of The Wild One—a place that would’ve been forbidden, if the girl’s parents had known.

  What might have happened!—by chance, did not happen.

  Because inside the Main Street Cinema were rows of seats near-empty in the
dark, commingled smells of stale popcorn and cigarette smoke—(for this was an era when there was “smoking in the loge”), and on the screen the astonishing magnified figure of “Johnny” in black leather jacket, opaque dark sunglasses, on his motorcycle exuding the sulky authority of the young predator-male.

  Because when asked what you were rebelling against you said with wonderful disdain, Whaddya got?

  Because that was our answer too, that we had not such words to utter.

  Because as Johnny you took us on the outlaw motorcycle, we clung to your waist like the sleep of children.

  Because as Johnny you were the face of danger, and you were unrepentant.

  Because as Johnny you could not say Thank you.

  Because as Johnny you abandoned us in the end.

  Because on that motorcycle you grew smaller and smaller on the road out of the small town, and vanishing.

  Because you have vanished. Because in plain sight you vanished.

  Because the recklessness of adolescence is such elation, the heart is filled to bursting.

  Because recklessness is the happy quotient of desperation, and contiguous with shame, and yet it is neither of these, and greater than the sum of these.

  Because the girl will recall through her life how you entered her life like sunlight illuminating a landscape wrongly believed to be denuded of beauty.

  Because there is a savage delight in loss, and in the finality of loss.

  Because at age twenty-three on Broadway you derailed A Streetcar Named Desire, and made the tragedy of Blanche DuBois the first of your triumphs.

  So defiantly Stanley Kowalski, there has been none since.

  Because after Brando, all who follow are failed impersonators.

  Bawling and bestial and funny, crude laughter of the polack-male, the humiliation of the Southern female whose rape is but another joke.

  Because you were the consummate rapist, with the swagger of the rapist enacting the worst brute will of the audience.

  Because you were Terry Malloy, the screen filled with your battered boy’s face.

  Because sweetness and hurt were conjoined in that face.

  Because you took up the glove dropped by Eva Marie Saint, and put it on your

  hand, appropriating the blond Catholic girl and wearing her like a glove.

  Because you exposed your soul in yearning—I coulda been a contender!—knowing how defeat, failure, ignominy would be your fate.

  Because in 1955 at the age of thirty-one, after having won an Academy Award for On the Waterfront, you were interviewed by Edward R. Murrow wreathed in cigarette smoke like a shroud and in your rented stucco house in the hills above Los Angeles already you were speaking of trying to be “normal.” Because you endured the interviewer’s lame questions—“Have you discovered that success can have its own problems?”—“Are you planning a long career as an actor?”

  Because you conceded, “I can’t do anything else well.”

  Because you said you wanted to sing and dance on screen, you wanted to be “superficial”—you wanted to “entertain.”

  Because on the mantel of the rented house was a portrait of your mother at forty, your alcoholic mother who’d failed to love you enough.

  Because your discomfort with the interview was evident.

  Because you spoke of the fear of losing “anonymity” when already “anonymity” was lost.

  Because the awkwardly staged interview ended with you playing bongo drums with another drummer, in the bizarrely decorated basement of the rented house.

  Because quickly then your hands slapped the drums with a kind of manic precision, your eyes half-shut, a goofy happiness

  softened your face.

  Because at this moment it was not (yet) too late.

  Because you grew into the predator male careless in fatherhood fathering eleven children whom you would scarcely know and of whom three were with your Guatemalan housekeeper.

  Because you were the absent father of a drug-addled son most like yourself except lacking your talent (“Christian”) who shot to death the fiancé of his younger sister (“Cheyenne”) in your house in Los Angeles, was incarcerated for manslaughter, and died young; and the absent father of the “Cheyenne” who hanged herself soon after the murder, aged twenty-five.

  Because your beauty seduced you, and made of you a prankster.

  Because the prankster always goes too far, that is the essence of prank.

  Because you were a prankster, sowing death like semen.

  Because all you had, you had to squander.

  Because you tried, like Paul Muni, to disappear into film.

  Because you were Mark Antony, Sky Masterson, Zapata, Fletcher Christian, Napoleon! You were the clownish cross-dresser-outlaw of One-Eyed Jacks—a film debacle you’d directed yourself. You were Vito Corelone and you were the garrulous bald fat Kurtz of Apocalypse Now, mumbling and staggering in the dark, bloated American madness.

  Because as the widower Paul of Last Tango in Paris you stripped your sick soul bare, in the radiance of disintegration. Because you were stunned in terror of annihilation yet played the clown, baring your buttocks on a Parisian dance floor.

  Because confounded by the corpse of the dead beautiful wife framed ludicrously in flowers you could hardly speak, and then you spoke too much. Because you were stupid in grief. Because you could not forgive.

  Wipe off the cosmetic mask! You hadn’t known the dead woman, and you would not know the dead woman, who had not been faithful to you. All you can know is the compliant body of your lover far too young for you, and only as a body.

  The futility of male sexuality, as a bulwark against death.

  The farce of male sexuality, as a bulwark against death.

  Because nonetheless you danced with astonishing drunken grace, with the girl young as a daughter. On the tango dance floor you spun, you fell to your knees, you shrugged off your coat, you were wearing a proper shirt and a tie to belie drunkenness and despair, fell flat on your back on the dance floor amid oblivious dancers and yet at once in rebuke of all expectation you were on your feet again and—dancing . . .

  And in a drunken parody of tango you were unexpectedly light on your feet, radiant in playfulness, clowning, in mockery of the heightened emotions and sexual drama of tango—as in your youth you’d wanted to be “superficial” and to “entertain”—

  And then, lowering your trousers and baring your buttocks in the exhilaration of contempt.

  Because the actor does not exist, if he is not the center of attention. Because the actor’s heart is an emptiness no amount of adulation can fill.

  Because after the slapstick-tango you lay curled in the exhaustion of grief and in the muteness of grief, a fetal corpse on a balcony in greylit Paris.

  In Hell, there is tango. The other dancers dance on.

  Because you made of self-loathing a caprice of art.

  Because what was good in you, your social conscience, your generosity to liberal causes, was swallowed up in the other.

  Because you squandered yourself in a sequence of stupid films as if in defiance of your talent and of our expectations of that talent.

  Because by late middle-age you’d lived too long.

  Where there has been such love,

  there can be no forgiveness.

  Because at eighty you’d endured successive stages of yourself, like a great tree suffocated in its own rings, beginning to rot from within.

  Because when you died, we understood that you had died long before.

  Because we could not forgive you, who had thrown greatness away.

  Because you have left us. And we are lonely.

  And we would join you in Hell, if you would have us.

  from Salmagundi

  SHARON OLDS

  * * *

  Ode to the Glans

  I know—why did I wait until now,

  the last moment, almost the moment

  after the last moment, to sing

 
; to you, outermost, tender, heart.

  Respect held me back, and shyness.

  Before I first saw you, I had not

  seen even a picture of you, and you were

  fearsome—when it would come down to it,

  between you and my maidenhead,

  I knew I could trust you to push until I was

  torn from my virginity—

  and you were adorable, you and the penis

  like the dearest most basic doll, you were like

  a brain without a skull, you were like

  a soul. When I was eye to eye,

  for the first time, with you, and I saw you

  weep, the gleaming tear emerge

  from the top of your mind, from your fontanelle,

  I saw how it was going to be—

  it was going to be what the movie, in the dark

  school auditorium, had

  promised, the blossoming flower, the rich

  spongy corolla, the firm male

  softness, it was going to be

  mercy, and ecstasy—and, in there,

  there were real babies, tiny, brand-new,

  with tinier babies inside them, enough

  to last a lifetime, and beyond a lifetime and a lifetime.

  from Ploughshares

  MATTHEW OLZMANN

  * * *

  Letter Beginning with Two Lines by Czesław Miłosz

  You whom I could not save,

  Listen to me.

  Can we agree Kevlar

  backpacks shouldn’t be needed

  for children walking to school?

  Those same children

  also shouldn’t require a suit

  of armor when standing

  on their front lawns, or snipers

  to watch their backs

  as they eat at McDonald’s.

  They shouldn’t have to stop

  to consider the speed

  of a bullet or how it might

  reshape their bodies. But

  one winter, back in Detroit,

  I had one student

  who opened a door and died.

  It was the front

  door to his house, but

  it could have been any door,

  and the bullet could have written