Best American Poetry 2017

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)
/>
  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