by David Lehman
MARY RUEFLE
* * *
Genesis
Oh, I said, this is going to be.
And it was.
Oh, I said, this will never happen.
But it did.
And a purple fog descended upon the land.
The roots of trees curled up.
The world was divided into two countries.
Every photograph taken in the first was of people.
Every photograph taken in the second showed none.
All of the girl children were named And.
All of the boy children named Then.
from Poetry
KAY RYAN
* * *
Some Transcendent Addiction to the Useless
—George Steiner, The Poetry of Thought
Unlike the
work of
most people
you’re supposed
to unthread
the needle.
It will be
a lifetime
task, far
from simple:
the empty eye
achievable—
possibly—but
it’s going
to take
fake sewing
worthy of
Penelope.
from Parnassus: Poetry in Review
MARY JO SALTER
* * *
We’ll Always Have Parents
It isn’t what he said in Casablanca
and it isn’t strictly true. Nonetheless
we’ll always have them, much as we have Paris.
They’re in our baggage, or perhaps are baggage
of the old-fashioned type, before the wheels,
which we remember when we pack for Paris.
Or don’t remember. Paris doesn’t know
if you’re thinking of it. Neither do your parents,
although they’ll say you ought to visit more,
as if they were as interesting as Paris.
Both Paris and your parents are as dead
and as alive as what’s inside your head.
Meanwhile, those lovers, younger every year
(because with every rerun we get older),
persuade us less, for all their cigarettes
and shining unshed tears about the joy
of Paris blurring in their rearview mirror,
that they’ve surpassed us in sophistication.
Granted, they were born before our parents
but don’t they seem by now, Bogart and Bergman,
like our own children? Think how we could help!
We could ban their late nights, keep them home
the whole time, and prevent their ill-starred romance!
Here’s looking at us, Kid. You’ll thank your parents.
from The Common
JASON SCHNEIDERMAN
* * *
Voxel
O newest of new words,
welcome to my mouth!
Though you are still not
in the dictionary (yet),
you are transparent in meaning:
a pixel with volume,
the basic unit of 3-D
printing, and now that we have
you, voxel, Plato will have
to let us back in his Republic
because we can print beds
and guns and pots and pans
and for so long, we thought
that nothing could be imagined
until it was imagined by us;
and if now, like those monks
in that story, where they
end the world by finding
every possible arrangement
for the letters in the name
of God, we too can see
everything that can ever
be photographed
or represented visually,
at least to the sighted,
then pixels mean
that we can predict
every thing that might
ever be seen by creating
an algorithm to generate
every permutation of every
image that could ever
be arranged out of pixels
and yes, the permutations
are so many as to be infinite
for all practical purposes
because we die, because
we can more easily calculate
the number of possibilities
than actually look at them,
and yes, this was always
in our eyes, because pixels
are merely externalized
rods and cones
but still, every single one
of those possibilities is there
in that algorithm, or in the
idea of that algorithm,
and you, little voxel,
are still a primitive thing,
a gradation so coarse as to
evoke Donkey Kong in
its earliest days
of blocky charm,
but refinement
is our human skill,
so much more so
than love or penmanship
or peacemaking, at which
we have learned little, but now,
voxel, everything is contained
inside you—not fire
perhaps—but our model
of fire—not affection,
perhaps—but our model
of affection, and dear voxel,
the smaller your become,
the more powerful you will be.
Dear voxel, already
I am beginning to think
of myself in terms of you,
and sweet voxel, the day
is coming when I will print
my selfies as tiny dioramas
made of you, and you will know
that you contain all
that is human
in the universe,
that you hold everything
in versatile potential,
my neurons, my face,
my planet, my stem cells,
my lover, my spaceship,
my coffin, my poems,
my eyesight, my corpse.
from The Literary Review
NICOLE SEALEY
* * *
A Violence
You hear the high-pitched yowls of strays
fighting for scraps tossed from a kitchen window.
They sound like children you might have had.
Had you wanted children. Had you a maternal bone,
you would wrench it from your belly and fling it
from your fire escape. As if it were the stubborn
shard now lodged in your wrist. No, you would hide it.
Yes, you would hide it inside a barren nesting doll
you’ve had since you were a child. Its smile
reminds you of your father, who does not smile.
Nor does he believe you are his. “You look just like
your mother,” he says, “who looks just like a fire
of suspicious origin.” A body, I’ve read, can sustain
its own sick burning, its own hell, for hours.
It’s the mind. It’s the mind that cannot.
from The New Yorker
MICHAEL SHEWMAKER
* * *
Advent
His mother must have looked away,
the reckless boy who teeters on
the railing of the balcony.
Beneath him, the congregation sings
a final hymn in a minor key.
Above, the oculus, gold leaf,
the folded wings of Gabriel.
Impossible to say what lured
him from his seat—the choir’s appeal
or the angel’s feet?
What is his name
so we might call him, safely, down—
this child who balances between
what cannot and what can be seen,
&
nbsp; the martyrs and the marbled ground?
from The Sewanee Review
CARMEN GIMÉNEZ SMITH
* * *
Dispatch from Midlife
Gender is the civic center
of my adrenal gland.
I am bound by certainty
to keep it in a shell.
Past fertility, insomnia
is the new membrane
around my nights. My
mortal terror is the now
with what’s left of me.
What are you, demand
the witches from the throne
of their own infallible
femininity. I’m a monster
of my own making who quit
one guile for this new one,
wanton with indifference.
from Colorado Review
TRACY K. SMITH
* * *
An Old Story
We were made to understand it would be
Terrible. Every small want, every niggling urge,
Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind.
Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful
Dream. The worst in us having taken over
And broken the rest utterly down.
A long age
Passed. When at last we knew how little
Would survive us—how little we had mended
Or built that was not now lost—something
Large and old awoke. And then our singing
Brought on a different manner of weather.
Then animals long believed gone crept down
From trees. We took new stock of one another.
We wept to be reminded of such color.
from The Nation
GARY SNYDER
* * *
Why California Will Never Be Like Tuscany
There must have been huge oaks and pines, cedars,
maybe madrone,
in Tuscany and Umbria long ago.
A few centuries after wood was gone, they began to build with brick and stone.
Brick and stone farm houses, solid, fireproof,
steel shutters and doors.
But farming changed.
Sixty thousand vacant solid fireproof Italian farm houses
on the market in 1970,
scattered across the land.
Sixty thousand affluent foreigners,
to fix them, learn to cook, and write a book.
But in California, houses all are wood—
roads pushed through, sewers dug, lines laid underground—
hundreds of thousands, made of strandboard, sheetrock, plaster.
They won’t be here 200 years from now—they’ll burn or rot.
No handsome solid second homes for
thousand-year-later wealthy
Melanesian or Eskimo artists and writers here,
—oak and pine will soon return.
from Catamaran
A. E. STALLINGS
* * *
Pencil
Once, you loved permanence,
Indelible. You’d sink
Your thoughts in a black well,
And called the error, ink.
And then you crossed it out;
You canceled as you went.
But you craved permanence,
And honored the intent.
Perfection was a blot
That could not be undone.
You honored what was not,
And it was legion.
And you were sure, so sure,
But now you cannot stay sure.
You turn the point around
And honor the erasure.
Rubber stubs the page,
The heart, a stiletto of lead,
And all that was black and white
Is in-between instead.
All scratch, all sketch, all note,
All tentative, all tensile
Line that is not broken,
But pauses with the pencil,
And all choice, multiple,
The quiz that gives no quarter,
And Time the other implement
That sharpens and grows shorter.
from The Atlantic
ANNE STEVENSON
* * *
How Poems Arrive
You say them as your undertongue declares
Then let them knock about your upper mind
Until the shape of what they mean appears.
Like love, they’re strongest when admitted blind,
Judging by feel, feeling with sharpened sense
While yet their need to be is undefined.
Inaccurate emotion—as intense
As action sponsored by adrenaline—
Feeds on itself, and in its own defense
Fancies its role humanitarian,
But poems, butch or feminine, are vain
And draw their satisfactions from within,
Sporting with vowels, or showing off a chain
Of silver els and ms to host displays
Of intimacy or blame or joy or pain.
The ways of words are tight and selfish ways,
And each one wants a slot to suit its weight.
Lines needn’t scan like this with every phrase,
But something like a pulse must integrate
The noise a poem makes with its invention.
Otherwise, write prose. Or simply wait
Till it arrives and tells you its intention.
from The Hudson Review
ADRIENNE SU
* * *
Substitutions
Balsamic, for Zhenjiang vinegar.
Letters, for the family gathered.
A Cuisinart, for many hands.
Petty burglars, for warring bands.
A baby’s room, for tight quarters.
Passing cars, for neighbors.
Lawn-mower buzzing, for bicycle bells.
Cod fillets, for carp head-to-tail.
Children who overhear the language,
for children who speak the language.
Virginia ham, for Jinhua ham,
and nothing, for the noodle man,
calling as he bears his pole
down alley and street, its baskets full
of pickled mustard, scallions, spice,
minced pork, and a stove he lights
where the customer happens to be,
the balance of hot, sour, salty, sweet,
which decades later you still crave,
a formula he’ll take to the grave.
from New England Review
NATASHA TRETHEWEY
* * *
Shooting Wild
At the theater I learn shooting wild,
a movie term that means filming a scene
without sound, and I think of being a child
watching my mother, how quiet she’d been,
soundless in our house made silent by fear.
At first her gestures were hard to understand,
and her hush when my stepfather was near.
Then one morning, the imprint of his hand
dark on her face, I learned to watch her more:
the way her grip tightened on a fork, night
after night; how a glance held me, the door—
a sign that made the need to hear so slight
I can’t recall her voice since she’s been dead:
no sound of her, no words she might have said.
from Poet Lore
AGNIESZKA TWOREK
* * *
Grief Runs Untamed
In one hand the exiles hold a bundle
with a blanket, medicine, and a comb;
in the other, a door handle.
They attach it to every mountain and wall,
hoping the handle will conjure the door
that will open and let them in.
Through the swamps, down the dirt roads,
through the frigid water the exiles go,
knowing
they shall never return.
In their former homes, if there are still homes,
the wind wails. Spiders weave
their shrouds over the cupboards and beds.
Cats, left behind, wait to be scratched under their chins;
a dog smells the scarf a young girl dropped
and barks on the cellar stairs.
Near the road thousands took to flee,
a carcass of a cow still tied to the olive tree,
abandoned like their tea sets and pots.
A widow with children runs from the Guatemalan gangs.
Newlyweds from Syria huddle in a dinghy
in the Mediterranean, their wedding rings sold
to help them pay the way. A couple from Sudan
limp along on the scorched ground with their epileptic son.
Those who survive and settle in a new place
sometimes dream at night of returning
by foot to their native homes.
When they wake up, they have blisters on their feet.
from The Sun
G. C. WALDREP
* * *
Dear Office in Which I Must Account for Tears,
You were a forest once. I passed through you
and my garments were torn by thorns.
After that, I did not venture near the lambs
that would be charged with your death.
I did not feed the horses
toward which you were stampeding.
We were young then, together, and then
an art grew up between us.
I received mail at this address long before
my vocation took me here; I discarded it
unopened, a dew upon the stippled grass.
