by David Lehman
Now you may take her out of there.
No need anymore to fear her fear.
Now you can be kind to her.
Wasn’t there a time when she was happier?
Before you were alive to make everything harder?
When all that hurt her had not yet touched her?
Take her back now to being engaged to your father,
twenty-three in nineteen thirty-four,
on a country picnic in an open roadster,
when she could breathe easily the purest air,
when she had just found love that filled her and fulfilled her,
when she believed everything life has to offer
was opening before her.
And leave her there.
from The Kenyon Review
DAVID ST. JOHN
* * *
Emanations
—Jeffers Country
As the trees conspired toward evening I walked below the tor
its long grass edged & interrupted by rock
& low bracken in an air sifted by the sea’s scent powdered
by kelp & foam Jeffers said
Of Weston as he might have said exactly of himself it takes great
strength to believe truly
In solitude trusting its sinews & silence holding yourself against
waves of your own darkness
I was taking Evangeline to rehab in Pacific Grove twenty years ago
a place near Point Pinos Lighthouse
Lance had just moved to a new manse in Carmel at Scenic & Stewart
& he’d said to come by because
He was right by Tor House & he was pretty sure I could find my way
& when I arrived I saw Jimi the Lion there & Cissie too & I yelled into
the kitchen where Lance was swirling
Pasta in a pan & finally as I made my way to greet him I saw just
past the kitchen patio not
Thirty feet beyond his window those huge looming eggs of stone
the granite boulders Jeffers
Hauled & rolled from the shore beyond the tor every afternoon
its medieval & majestic power
One whole side of Hawk Tower stolidly ascending in front of me
& sometimes
The land can seem as harsh or even harsher than a skeptical man
who walks mornings not speaking
The world’s raw sea edge awaiting him—he who slowly made
stone love stone
There’s a photo of my namesake son at eight beside me as we follow
the trail to Pinnacle Rock
& Cypress Grove on his first visit to Point Lobos exactly the age I was
when first there with my aunt
& I remember feeling like the father I wasn’t until that day my son
& I stood together above those lethal rocks
Smashed by purposeful waves & those skyrocket cathedrals of spray
Above Castro Creek a redwood circle illumined—its lichen lit
by sunlight
An early silence & the day is released along the whole length
of Castro Canyon Anna’s waking
Beneath the skylight of our cabin as outside the birds unchain
again the many swaying promises of limbs
Within those nearby pines & naturally in this room beyond
Last night feeling as random as the rain . . . I read in Daybooks
Weston praising Jeffers & that fierce pulse
Weston called the resurgent will of the natural world & I thought
of Anna yesterday
Approached by a doe & curious fawns walking the circumference
of Whaler’s Cove
& last week returning along the high cliffside trail from China Cove
we’d stopped so I could shoot all
Point Lobos fanned out & ragged—its exquisite prospects rising up
& just below us a discrete pebble beach
& familiar tide pools where Ansel Adams told anyone who’d listen
must one day be named Weston Beach
& so it was & so it is
The summer I turned sixteen visiting my aunt in the skylit studio
she’d built onto the cottage
In my grandmother’s landscaped garden among rose beds & curved
lawns & tall candles of iris—& as
We talked across the rising perfume of turpentine & fresh oils my aunt
turned from the canvas
She’d been painting of the Santa Lucia Range & paused a moment
handing me
A birthday gift a fresh hardcover of Not Man Apart with Jeffers’s poems
& images of Big Sur’s coast
& she opened the book to a photograph by Weston of the familiar cove
its surly rocks & twisted kelp & pebbles
& asked Do you remember the day I took you here? That man who called
out hello with the tripod & box camera was
Weston’s son—my gorgeous old Graflex I always use & love was his once
A few years after Lance moved from his place down along
Yankee Point up to the Highlands
We rendezvoused in Carmel & I followed him past the turnoff
leading to Weston’s house on Wildcat Hill
Until we looped up Mal Paso onto San Remo & then we all just
sat watching
That scarlet sunset fan-dance over the Pacific’s darkening jade
For years I’d kept a notebook of obscure trails between Point Lobos
& Gorda all those glories
Of both Big & Little Sur but that morning we decided let’s be obvious
& drove down toward McWay Falls
Stopping on the roadside to spend time along Partington Cove Trail
—I broke stride a moment as above the meadow in the dense pines
a shadow cross
Hung overhead barely clearing the pines’ tips a silent condor just
arcing away
The span of its wings ten feet one fan-feathered tip to the other
I grew up in a house of redwood glass & stone the house my mother
built from Cliff May’s blueprints
A lesson in organic mid-century modern aspiration huge exposed
beams of solid redwood its ceiling planks too
The fireplace a mosaic of flagstones & multicolored volcanic rocks
& living room walls pale Australian gum
A house that could comfortably have fit in Mill Valley or Carmel
yet somehow also in the arid San Joaquin
The Fresno of my childhood where it stood as testament to possibility
—my California of the ’50s
Today we walked down to Henry Miller’s library to steal Wi-Fi
& sit with an espresso
—as news of the world came a hawk overhead dipped one wing
So I turned off my phone & opened The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
& that’s all the irony anyone should share
In 1936 a hundred miles south of these rock crags sloping low & falling
abruptly off into the Pacific
Charis drove Weston to Oceano & its miles of dunes so he could plant
his 8 x 10 Century Universal camera on its skinny tripod
Into the sands & one day Charis sunbathing nude decided simply to roll
down the face of one dune & another
& so posing for Edward the Spy those hours & days while they stayed
in Gavin Arthur’s (see The Circle of Sex)
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Old beach shack & this morning I awoke thinking of Charis driving back
up Highway 1 along the coast
Past Morro Rock & Moonstone Beach past Piedras Blancas & Lucia
& up over Bixby Creek then to the Highlands
All the way to Wildcat Hill & the swarm of felines tame & feral & then
Edward making coffee
As she began slicing the apples she’d left on the wood counter to ripen
& now emanations
Of naked Edenic fruits were scenting the whole length of the room
Its bare redwood planks & ripening apple flesh held in late dusk
& the wood stove
Heated up as Charis knelt to feed more limbs to its belly & she knew
these next days in the darkroom
They would bring to paper this sequence of nudes her body white on
white against Oceano’s dunes
Her final acquiescence & reverence for skin married to a future light
One day last fall I went to Tor House early to be alone a few hours
before the tours began
& climb the stairs of Hawk Tower in solitude & later stand in silence
by the bed by the sea-window
Jeffers chose as a good death-bed thirty years before the fact to see
The pulse of waves licking raw the shore stones as pines & cypress
chimed in the sea wind
It hardly matters to anyone but me how sometimes as I walk this coast
Point Pinos Point Lobos Point Sur I’m singing
South Coast the wild coast is lonely . . . the lion still rules the barranca
& a man there is always alone
from The Southern Review
SHEROD SANTOS
* * *
I Went for a Walk in Winter
The snow didn’t fall so much as blow past
horizontally. People heading east leaned into it,
people heading west leaned back, then one after another
they disappeared, as in the fade-out of a movie screen.
As if the world were reduced to the simplest natural law—
that of erasure—a hotel doorman struggled to clear
a sidewalk path that quickly filled in behind him.
So, too, the hollow left behind on a bus stop bench.
Above the entry to a corridor, a blue and yellow
neon sign lit my side of the street; I felt my body
pass through it, and I felt the colors pass
through me, as though a mood had suddenly
come and gone leaving only a tremor behind.
After I returned to my apartment, I found it difficult
to focus on anything; and when I switched on
the television it took me a moment to realize
that a movie in a foreign language was on,
though what language that was I couldn’t say.
The uniforms of the soldiers locked in battle
were likewise unfamiliar, and the frozen landscape
provided no clue. Muskets were fired, swords
were drawn, orders were shouted and, I assumed,
carried out, for bodies continued to drop in numbers
carnage alone explained. Somewhere off-screen,
wagons were already being readied to haul away
the dead, and this too I took in, less to imagine
the event than foresee the end: the battlefield cleared,
the blood covered over by ever-amassing drifts of snow.
from Harvard Review
TAIJE SILVERMAN
* * *
Where to Put It
The room in which I start sobbing again and wonder
if my sobs will hurt the baby inside me, and the room
in which I hope so, a room made entirely of a window.
The room of my husband’s goodnight,
which is a room in a large municipal building with Styrofoam ceilings
where lines must be formed so forms can be signed, a room
surrounded by parking lots, and he knocks opening its door
and says, You can’t be this sad for the next five months—it’s not tenable.
The room overlooking the perfectly circular hole
in our street that’s at least ten feet deep and no neighbor
knows when it appeared or if there’s a reason.
The room in which instead of eating dinner
I drive for hours past porches where women with voices
like hammered fenders call out baseball scores
into the peeled blue air that will not link itself to a season.
The room in which a man the color of sand
stands on a median toward the end of dusk with a sign saying
he has children and will do anything
and the room of the cars before lights turn green.
The room in which we are filled with longing
like a wave too large. Do you see me is what we can’t
find words to ask.
The room in which a new student shows up
for my poetry class for formerly homeless people who are mentally ill
and she has my mother’s smile.
The room in which so many women
have my mother’s smile: women entering restaurants, women
standing at counters with handfuls of change.
The room of the dream in which the baby
is my mother and I am the vent between steam and the street.
The room in which I tell my father,
I miss Mom so much I can’t think about her and the room in which
he answers back, Me too, lit as it is by the end of dusk and the cars
passing through when the stoplights turn; now the man’s sign drops, I’ll
do anything.
The room in which my father is living
with a woman younger than I am and the room in which he is my father
and the corridor between them down which no one walks, and Do you see me,
Yes I see you, and Do you see me, No I’m lonely,
and the room of my seventy-year-old father
and his seventy-year-old friends pretending to trip each other and laughing,
and the room in which they’re invisible, age like the white ceiling
and white walls, the window dissolved to a water-shaped memory of touch.
The room in which I ask the no-longer-homeless woman
what the poem about kindness is about and she says it’s about anger,
says this with my mother’s smile, the smile of my mother’s illness
that could have decimated grown men in agreement with each other, and did.
The room in which the woman’s smile
becomes an ordinary moth that lifts off the table and slips through a hole
in the star-cracked slats of the ceiling’s foam—Are we sharing a space,
do you see me.
The room of the water-shaped tenable.
The room in the house, the lit room upstairs, books on the shelves
by the window, the room we drive by in the nighttime, someone inside.
from The Georgia Review
CHARLES SIMIC
* * *
Seeing Things
I came here in my youth,
A wind toy on a string.
Saw a street in hell and one in paradise.
Saw a room with a light in it so ailing
It could’ve been leaning on a cane.
Saw an old man in a tailor shop
>
Kneel before a bride with pins between his lips.
Saw the President swear on the Bible
While snow fell around him.
Saw a pair of lovers kiss in an empty church
And a naked man run out of a building
Waving a gun and sobbing.
Saw kids wearing Halloween masks
Jump from one roof to another at sunset.
Saw a van full of stray dogs look back at me.
Saw a homeless woman berating God
And a blind man with a guitar singing:
“Oh Lord remember me,
When these chains are broken set my body free.”
from The Threepenny Review
DANEZ SMITH
* * *
last summer of innocence
there was Noella who knew i was sweet
but cared enough to bother with me
that summer when nobody died
except for boys from other schools
but not us, for which our mothers
lifted his holy name & even let us skip
some Sundays to go to the park
or be where we had no business being
talking to girls who had no interest
in us, who flocked to their new hips
dumb birds we were, nectar high
& singing all around them, preening
waves all day, white beater & our best
basketball shorts, the flyest shoes
our mamas could buy hot, line-up fresh
from someone’s porch, someone’s uncle
cutting heads round the corner cutting
eyes at the mothers of girls i pretended
to praise. i showed off for girls
but stared at my stupid, boney crew.
i knew the word for what i was
but couldn’t think it. i played football
& believed its salvation, its antidote.
when Noella n ’nem didn’t come out
& instead we turned our attention
to our wild legs, narrow arms & pigskin
i spent all day in my brothers’ arms
