Best American Poetry 2017

by David Lehman

  any name. The shooter

  was thirteen years old

  and was aiming

  at someone else. But

  a bullet doesn’t care

  about “aim,” it doesn’t

  distinguish between

  the innocent and the innocent,

  and how was the bullet

  supposed to know this

  child would open the door

  at the exact wrong moment

  because his friend

  was outside and screaming

  for help. Did I say

  I had “one” student who

  opened a door and died?

  That’s wrong.

  There were many.

  The classroom of grief

  had far more seats

  than the classroom for math

  though every student

  in the classroom for math

  could count the names

  of the dead.

  A kid opens a door. The bullet

  couldn’t possibly know,

  nor could the gun, because

  “guns don’t kill people,” they don’t

  have minds to decide

  such things, they don’t choose

  or have a conscience,

  and when a man doesn’t

  have a conscience, we call him

  a psychopath. This is how

  we know what type of assault rifle

  a man can be,

  and how we discover

  the hell that thrums inside

  each of them. Today,

  there’s another

  shooting with dead

  kids everywhere. It was a school,

  a movie theater, a parking lot.

  The world

  is full of doors.

  And you, whom I cannot save,

  you may open a door

  and enter

  a meadow or a eulogy.

  And if the latter, you will be

  mourned, then buried

  in rhetoric.

  There will be

  monuments of legislation,

  little flowers made

  from red tape.

  What should we do? we’ll ask

  again. The earth will close

  like a door above you.

  What should we do?

  And that click you hear?

  That’s just our voices,

  the deadbolt of discourse

  sliding into place.

  from Poem-a-Day

  GREGORY ORR

  * * *

  Three Dark Proverb Sonnets

  1.

  None have done wrong who still

  Have a tongue: even Cain

  Can explain.

       Yet every atrocity

  Breeds its reciprocity:

  No murder

  That doesn’t lead to further.

  If I was in charge, those who

  Praise rage would be made

  To visit more graves.

           Skulls

  Annul. All knives should be dull.

  And yet, once we’d built the coffin

  We had no choice: we had to find a corpse.

  2.

  Watch the leopard, not its spots.

  It’s the tiger that strikes,

  Not the stripes.

  The smart hide their claws

  In their paws, then add

  Fur for allure.

  Combining smiles and wiles

  And calling it “style.”

  A sword has a point,

  But a needle

  Is sharper and cleaner—

  Less mess, less evidence.

  It was never just the arrow

  We bowed to; it was also the bow.

  3.

  Remember: every fist

  Began as an open hand.

  Even a bridge is a ledge

  If you stray to its edge.

  You can lead a horse

  To water, but

  You can’t make it drink.

  You can guide a fool

  To wisdom,

  But you can’t make him think.

  You can close one eye to evil,

  But you’d better not blink.

  In the dark, adjust your eyes.

  In the darker, your heart.

  from Mississippi Review

  CARL PHILLIPS

  * * *

  Rockabye

        Weeping, he seemed more naked

  than when he’d been naked—more, even, than when

  we’d both been. Time to pitch your sorrifying

  someplace else, I keep meaning to say to him, and then

  keep not saying it. Lightning bugs, fireflies—hasn’t what

  we called them made every difference. As when history

  sometimes, given chance enough, in equal proportion

  at once delivers

         and shrouds meaning . . . About love: a kind

  of scaffolding, I used to say. Illumination seemed

  a trick meant to make us think we’d seen a thing more

  clearly, before it all went black. Why not let what’s broken

  stay broken, sings the darkness, I

                make the darkness

  sing it . . . Across the field birds fly like the storm-shook shadows

  of themselves, and not like birds. Never mind. They’re flying.

  from Callaloo

  ROWAN RICARDO PHILLIPS

  * * *

  Halo

  We wander round ring after ring of life,

  One after another, blossoms of light

  To which we’re but a mere flotsam of bees.

  And although this isn’t true, the poem says

  This is true; life, light, flowers and bee: truths.

  So stop and hold this poem above your head.

  Hold it up to whatever light you find.

  Then let it go: forget it if you can.

  If it is meant to remain it will remain.

  And if it is meant to light, it will light.

  Your hands will have moved on to something else

  But your head will have, say it, its halo.

  from The American Scholar

  ROBERT PINSKY

  * * *

  Names

  Arbitrary but also essential.

  Before you can remember you will have found

  You are Parvati or Adam, Anne or Laquan, all

  With one same meaning: the meaning of the past,

  A thunder cloud. Byron de la Beckwith, Primo Levi.

  Medgar, Edgar, Hrothgar. Ishbaal.

  Not just an allusion, but also an example:

  Each with its meaning but also

  An instance of the meaning of naming.

  Lightning. Tamir. Abdi. Ikey Moe.

  “What kind of name is that?”

  Your own: the one word you can’t ever

  Hear clearly, but as in a carnival mirror.

  Found and to find. Sandra Bland.

  Tereke, Ehud. Jason. Duy. Quan.

  Lost and to find.

  Stammering Moses of Egypt, found

  Afloat among bulrushes. Royal.

  Aaron of Goshen, the articulate.

  from Salmagundi

  STANLEY PLUMLY

  * * *

  Poliomyelitis

  Magical numbers! Roosevelt the most famous infantile paralysis

  adult to ever live with it, thrive with it, die with it, at sixty-three,

  contracted at thirty-nine, the same integral number as my birth year

  and the year, 1939, when the world war that changes everything starts—

  the President treading water with his hands and arms, standing

  at poolside in Warm Springs, the life in his legs different from any feeling.

  Polio the proof that the child in us never disappears but turns against us

  jus
t when we think we’ve outgrown its memory and become who we are

  and were meant to be, a whole other human body with a mind like a city,

  more beautiful at night, while the still heart is a pastoral, with a piper.

  A man said Roosevelt, at the end, looked like the most dead man alive

  he’d ever seen: the girl in the iron lung, too, resembling what children

  imagine death in the satin of its coffin looks like, her face roughed up

  with rouge, her soft brown hair straightened, the rest of her forgotten.

  from Ploughshares

  PAISLEY REKDAL

  * * *

  Assemblage of Ruined Plane Parts, Vietnam Military Museum, Hanoi

  My eye climbs a row of spoilers soldered

  into ailerons, cracked bay doors haphazarded

  into windows where every rivet bleeds

  contrails of rust. An hour ago, the doctor’s wand

  waved across my chest and I watched blood

  on a small screen get back-sucked

  into my weakened heart. It’s grown a hole

  I have to monitor: one torn flap

  shuddering an infinite ellipses of gray stars

  back and forth. You’re the writer, the doctor said

  in French. Tell me what you see. Easier to stand

  in a courtyard full of tourists scrying shapes

  from this titanic Rorschach. Here’s a pump stub

  shaped like a hand; something celled,

  cavernously fluted as a lobster’s

  abdomen. How much work

  it must have taken to drag these bits

  out of pits of flame, from lake beds

  and rice paddies, and stack them in layers:

  the French planes heaped beneath

  the American ones, while the Englishwoman

  beside me peers into this mess

  of metals, trying to isolate one image

  from the rest. Ski boot buckle

  or tire pump, she muses at me, fossilized

  shark’s jaw, clothespin, wasp nest?

  According to the camera, it’s just a picture

  changing with each angle, relic

  turned to ribcage, chrome flesh

  to animal: all the mortal details

  enumerated, neutered. I watch her trace

  an aluminum sheet torched across a thrust

  as if wind had tossed a silk scarf

  over a face. If she pulled it back, would I find

  a body foreign as my own entombed

  in here, a thousand dog tags

  jangling in the dark? I tilt my head: the vision slides

  once more past me, each plane reassembling

  then breaking apart. Spikes of grief—

  or is it fury?—throb across the surface.

  Everything has a rip in it, a hole, a tear, the dim sounds

  of something struggling to pry open

  death’s cracked fuselage. White sparks,

  iron trails. My heart rustles

  in its manila folder. How the doctor smiled

  at the images I fed him: A row of trees, I said,

  pointing at my chart. Stone towers,

  a flock of backlit swallows—

            Now I kneel beside a cross

  of blades on which the Englishwoman

  tries to focus. Do you think I’ll get it

  all in the shot? She calls as she steps back.

  Steps back and back. Something like a knife sheath.

  Something like a saint’s skull. The sky

  floats past, horizon sucked into it. She won’t.

  from The Kenyon Review

  MICHAEL RYAN

  * * *

  The Mercy Home

  Your mother died in fear.

  No one was with her.

  You didn’t want to be with her.

  The last time you saw her, two months before,

  while you were saying goodbye to her,

  her turkey-claw hand shot up like a viper

  from under her wheelchair lap-cover

  to clasp your hand and keep you with her,

  to bind you to her,

  to not let you leave her ever.

  I CAN’T STAY HERE

  she screamed like a toddler, over and over,

  insane with fear, lost in fear,

  without a mind to guide her,

  her brain saying horrific truths to her.

  You were on the Mercy Home basement floor,

  by the nurses station, where she slept in her wheelchair,

  because she couldn’t be alone ever,

  because the moment another human being left her

  she was left with her fear, which instantly seized her,

  so she couldn’t sleep in her room or ever go there

  except when a nurse took her for a sitting shower

  and stripped her and undid her diaper

  and propped her weeping under the water

  and soaped her and rinsed her and dried her and dressed her

  and lifted her back into her wheelchair.

  Did she know the man standing over her

  was her son, saying goodbye to her?

  Your hand was any hand, a human tether.

  She wanted you to take her home in a car

  but the Mercy Home was her home—she had no other—

  she meant home with her husband and children fifty years before.

  What does it matter who you were to her?

  Or whether she had ever been your mother?

  She was a shrunken old woman, ninety-four,

  plundered by years of medical torture,

  installed in a wheelchair with a backpack oxygen canister

  that fed tubes up her nose so she wouldn’t drown in air.

  You felt all her fear-strength clamping your fingers

  as if she had slipped from a cliff and you were holding her,

  only it wasn’t gravity pulling your hand from her—

  it was you, pulling a trigger:

  your hand snapped free, recoiling like a revolver

  as if you had shot her,

  and you watched her fall into terror,

  into her nightmare future,

  and she couldn’t stop screaming over and over

  I CAN’T STAY HERE

  which is where you left her.

  She was right: she couldn’t stay there.

  She suffered her life only two months more—

  if every hour to her were not a year,

  if her death in fact meant her suffering was over.

  For all you know, she endured centuries there.

  (For all you know about what others suffer.)

  How did she fall out of her wheelchair?

  That was a question no one could answer.

  She gouged her leg so they stopped the blood thinner

  that kept her alive despite congestive heart failure

  so she died in the night three nights later

  in her bed in her room on the basement floor,

  alone with her fear, her tormenter, her familiar.

  The Mercy Home for aged and infirm Mercy Sisters

  and your mother, a devout believer,

  not a Sister but a faithful Catholic school teacher

  so they made an exception and accepted her.

  Those who need minimal care live on the second floor.

  Those who need assisted care live on the first floor.

  Those who need nursing care live on the basement floor,

  and one by one all of them die there.

  How do they bear moving lower

  when the last move left is to the basement floor?

  Their “personal items” and family pictures

  are gathered into cardboard boxes by the nurses helper

  because they don’t own luggage anymore,

  because they will never go anywhere.

  Hospital rooms off the basement floor corrido
r

  border the common rooms in the center:

  TV room, game room, lunch room, beauty parlor

  where a volunteer does the ladies’ hair.

  When someone dies in the night like your mother,

  the next morning the telling Lysol smell is everywhere

  while the room is aired, door propped open, bed stripped bare,

  and in the corner her former wheelchair

  empty except for its backpack oxygen canister.

  At breakfast there’s an extra prayer,

  and a prayer too by those in wheelchairs and walkers

  when they pass her room and try to remember her.

  How do the old nuns remember her?

  Tubes up her nose, dozing in her wheelchair?

  With you, the Cheerful Son when you visited her?

  This will be your attempt to remember her—

  not how she failed you so you failed her,

  not how confused she was by your anger,

  not how she needed your kindness as you had needed her

  when you couldn’t walk either and also wore a diaper

  and she carried you with her and pushed you in your stroller

  to parks and playgrounds to show you to neighbors.

  That last moment you were together,

  after you pulled your hand free and were about to leave her,

  you leaned over to kiss her, for what good it did her.

  At least you did that, helpless to help her.

  Now you may take her out of there.

  Now you’ll never fail each other.

  No drunk father, no molester neighbor,

  no sadist coaches, no nasty teachers,

  no nuns, no priests, no Pope, no hellfire,

  no need for her to be your protector,

  no need for her to suffer her failure

  or watch you grow absorbed by anger

  and wilder and wilder teenage behavior

  that scared the bejesus out of her

  (you loved scaring the bejesus out of her)—

  you who thought you invented despair,

  you who drank despair with your father.

  mother fear father despair molester neighbor

  shame fouling the air

  shame everywhere