by David Lehman
repurposed as a teacup.
Nor was she splenetic as
the poltergeist in the moka pot,
seething liquid from every fissure,
then exploding on its ring of gas.
If it seemed that water was fraught
with divinities under pressure,
maybe I was going mad myself,
just a little, in this hall of mirrors.
So much glass my eyes glazed over,
and green waves laminating a shelf
where recto sits, and verso appears
in blinding dazzle seeking cover.
Such a surplus of marble that
even in the apartment I occupied
(no palazzo), the stairs luminesced;
if, as Michelangelo had thought,
therein lurked an angel, it was mortified
under the tread of a houseguest.
But when I reached the door,
sprung the lock, climbed the last
spiral flight in thin air,
it was to a wheelhouse (more
or less) of a vessel held fast
to its view of the sestiere;
and I was alone with the seagulls,
listening to the creaking ropes
of dinghies below, whose sway
I felt—impossibly—in lulls
unaddressed as sails, or hopes:
tethered to my getaway.
San Marco
Morning glory folded in the scrolls
of columns dissolved their claims
to mass in a bisque-blue apparition;
dusk would blur the ink on rolls
recording their angelic names:
Fra Lippo Lapis, Azure-Titian . . .
like the boaters with their poles,
and not unlike the playground games
where you sidestep the cracks,
or leapfrog stepping-stones,
I tested substantiality bit by bit
with my whole body. Bones
of the duomo melt; how stacks
my hazy realness against it?
Scala d’Oro
I climbed the Golden Staircase.
Hadn’t meant to. Who sightsees
council chambers? . . . Blasé
toward doge, lawyer and delegate,
the scoop of whispering galleries,
I was arrested by the gilded vault
where images of Venus and her cult
were preamble to affairs of state.
Head tipped back, hand gripping rail. . . .
I was bowled over by the hubris.
Reached the antechamber reeling
at what hung in the balance: pale
throats bared, a puff piece
for the ages floating on the ceiling.
Antechamber, Main Hall
It struck me that there’d been a fire
in these rooms, if not a brawl.
More scuro than chiaro in the employ
of the magistrates, choirs
of angels boiled up to forestall
their double-dealings with trompe l’oeil.
Sooty gold-and-black marble conspires
to churn an atmosphere of upheaval . . .
Yes, this place was unwholesome.
I made out Hera gifting a peacock
to the republic. Her crowded bower
jostled, unanchored the gaze from
any mooring, put the whole baroque
in service to the reigning power.
Compass Room
“Imagine me as a three-dimensional chessboard
on which several dozen games are being played
around the clock, with multiple figures
whose functions take some up and down the board,
unconstrained by distances; others are confined to diagonals;
and some are either on foot or afloat but never both,
who rest in velvet-lined beds after harlequin day,
a moonlit sapphire set in windows nightly. . . .
“A room sighs when a door is opened, then closed.
I have hoarded all the thieves, swindlers, and traitors
in my iron stanzas like a bank vault, on the understanding
that a productive interest grows in the smallest cell;
that iniquity builds under pressure, from a principal;
that to someone powerful somewhere this is valuable.”
Piazzetta
Canal steps troubled by centuries
and off-the-shoulder things
that scandalize the sanctuaries
lead, among the stony echoings,
to wisdom like: Never send an email
when you’re angry—and never
make a promise when you’re happy. (Male
faces grinned.) We should endeavor,
one girl submitted, to take a grain of salt
with the outburst, the promise made in bed . . .
We should be trained to doubt; the default
will always be ardor. The cafés fed
their chatter into a cochlear gestalt,
a labyrinthine ear with no thread.
Vaporetto
No bellboys, no bellboys, I thought,
bumping the suitcase on each step,
not like Aschenbach had (what had I brought?
my hand squeezed bloodless by the strap).
And having failed to tip and fall,
I gave a last heave, and pushed the thing . . .
it snapped open like an arsenal
of folded silks (for parachute landing
in the dark, with flare). . . . Meanwhile
the bell-buoys in the lagoon recorded data
regarding tides, temperature, salinity,
the migratory sands . . . and if a regatta
glanced off a satellite into infinity,
it hung like a chandelier in time’s exile.
Envoi
She turned her ankle playing tennis
ten days before she was to go
on her first, lamentably shelved,
trip to Venice. How then is
she so long and so slow
to make amends to herself? . . .
Stepping back through the looking glass,
I’d tell my friends about the time
I made reservations for Venice,
then had to call them off seeing as
I couldn’t negotiate its sublime
on crutches, after a bout of tennis
on an uneven Moroccan clay court
put my right ankle in a cast.
The rhyme surely made an imprecation,
a sort of curse-cum-tort,
as well as the fact that in contrast
to the sport, Venice is a game for one.
The stamp of the real authenticates
imagination’s passport, I thought.
Yet as the train drew me backward
across the lagoon (whose cognates
include lacuna, of course), I fought
the cold, green voice that declared
It was as though she’d never been.
Yes? Or it’s that she went alone . . .
and saw myself reflected nowhere,
deprived of some . . . vitamin . . .
like a vampire feeling her bones
that can’t find herself in a mirror. . . .
But did she (a funny thing to ask)
sleep deeply, as I see she dreamed well?
I know mon ange—her elaborate schemes;
and in the city of the erotic masque,
her blindfolds and foam plugs are farcical;
bat-spread blackout curtains figure in regimes
where a plan of action or program
to lose consciousness is no paradox.
Refrigeration, wrapped in a duvet, is ideal. . . .
The light doze ends at 1 AM—
an existential cry from the clocks,
the gulling of a campanile.
from The Paris R
eview
KAMILAH AISHA MOON
* * *
Fannie Lou Hamer
“I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired!”
She sat across the desk from me, squirming.
It was stifling. My suite runs hot
but most days it is bearable.
This student has turned in nothing,
rarely comes to class. When she does,
her eyes bore into me with a disdain
born long before either of us.
She doesn’t trust anything I say.
She can’t respect my station,
the words coming out of these lips,
this face. My breathing
is an affront. It’s me, she says.
I never was this student’s professor—
her immediate reaction
seeing me at the Smart Board.
But I have a calling to complete
& she has to finish college,
return to a town where
she doesn’t have to look at,
listen to or respect anyone
like me—forever tall, large
& brown in her dagger eyes,
though it’s clear she looks down
on me. She can return—
if not to her hometown, another
enclave, so many others, where
she can brush a dog’s golden coat,
be vegan & call herself
a good person.
Are you having difficulty with your other classes?
No.
Go, I say, tenderly.
Loaded as a cop’s gun,
she blurts point-blank
that she’s afraid of me. Twice.
My soft syllables rattle something
planted deep,
so I tell her to go where
she’d feel more comfortable
as if she were my niece or
godchild, even wish her
a good day.
If she stays, the ways
this could backfire!
Where is my Kevlar shield
from her shame?
There’s no way to tell
when these breasts will evoke
solace or terror. I hate
that she surprises me, that I lull
myself to think her ilk
is gone despite knowing
so much more, and better.
I can’t proselytize my worth
all semester, exhaust us
for the greater good.
I can’t let her make me
a monster to myself—
I’m running out of time & pity
the extent of her impoverished
heart. She’s from New
England, I’m from the Mid-South.
Far from elderly, someone
just raised her like this
with love.
I have essays to grade
but words warp
on the white page, dart
just out of reach. I blink
two hours away, find it hard
to lift my legs, my voice,
my head precious to my parents
now being held
in my own hands.
How did they survive
so much worse, the millions
with all of their scars!
What would these rivers be
without their weeping,
these streets without
their faith & sweat?
Fannie Lou Hamer
thundered what they felt,
we feel, into DNC microphones
on black-and-white TV
years before
I was a notion.
She doesn’t know who
Fannie Lou Hamer is,
and never has to.
from Poem-a-Day
ANDREW MOTION
* * *
The Last of England
Three o’clock in the morning
in this hotel whose name
I cannot remember.
Am I screaming now
am I making any sound at all?
Concentrate Andrew.
Imagine tomorrow.
Imagine dozens of knives and forks
in kitchen drawers
lined with soft green baize.
Imagine
the shoe-shine boy
already skimming his tin of polish
and row of new-laid eggs
waiting at room temperature.
But still the ship will not sail
the glittery liner whose name
will come to me in a moment.
Still it is
moored to the solid earth.
Bound to the stifling earth
while vast wheels of stars
continue to spin overhead
and dawn
refuses to meet the horizon.
from The American Scholar
PAUL MULDOON
* * *
Aubade
At 1 a.m. the dairy sink
in your yard was a deer-glyphed megalith
caught in my headlights.
I found not only sermons
in stones but Tamerlane of Samarkand
in the Timberland mukluks
tossed on your bedroom floor.
Now I’d rather shop for staples
(bread, milk, Clorox)
at the twenty-four-hour Supermart
than lag
behind the laggard
dawn about to steal
from haystack to haystack, no less bent
on taking us to the brink
of destruction than was Clement V
on the Knights
Templar. He was determined
to disband
that herd of ten-point bucks
by showing them the door
courtesy of a papal
bull he dubbed “Vox
in excelso.” For I’m averse, sweetheart,
to ever again seeing a stag
take the head staggers,
ever again seeing dawn kneel
as if it might repent,
as if it might come to think
of itself as a figure from some ancient myth—
Mesopotamian? Hittite?
Greek? German?—
throwing up its hands
with the dumbstruck
oaks or shaking to their cores
the Japanese maples,
unyoking the great ox
from the straw-laden cart
even as it divines the hag
in the haggard,
then putting its shoulder to the wheel
it means to reinvent.
from The New Yorker
JOHN MURILLO
* * *
On Confessionalism
Not sleepwalking, but waking still,
with my hand on a gun, and the gun
in a mouth, and the mouth
on the face of a man on his knees.
Autumn of ’89, and I’m standing
in a section 8 apartment parking lot,
pistol cocked, and staring down
at this man, then up into the mug
of an old woman staring, watering
the single sad flower to the left
of her stoop, the flower also staring.
My engine idling behind me, a slow
moaning bassline and the bark
of a dead rapper nudging me on.
All to say, someone’s brokenhearted.
And this man with the gun in his mouth—
this man who, like me, is really little
more than a boy—may or may not
have something to do with it.
May or may not have said a thing
or two, betrayed a secret, say,
that walked my love away. And why
not say it: She adored me. And I,
her. More than anyone, anything
in life, up to then, and then
still,
for two decades after. And, therefore,
went for broke. Blacked out and woke
having gutted my piggy and pawned
all my gold to buy what a homeboy
said was a Beretta. Blacked out
and woke, my hand on a gun, the gun
in a mouth, a man, who was really
a boy, on his knees. And because
I loved the girl, I actually paused
before I pulled the trigger—once,
twice, three times—then panicked
not just because the gun jammed,
but because what if it hadn’t,
because who did I almost become,
there, that afternoon, in a section 8
apartment parking lot, pistol cocked,
with the sad flower staring, because
I knew the girl I loved—no matter
how this all played out—would never
have me back. Day of damaged ammo,
or grime that clogged the chamber.
Day of faulty rods, or springs come
loose in my fist. Day nobody died,
so why not hallelujah? Say amen or
Thank you? My mother sang for years
of God, babes and fools. My father,
lymph node masses fading from
his X-rays, said surviving one thing
means another comes and kills you.
He’s dead, and so, I trust him. Dead,
and so I’d wonder, years, about the work
I left undone—boy on his knees
a man now, risen, and likely plotting
his long way back to me. Fuck it.
I tucked my tool like the movie gangsters
do, and jumped back in my bucket.
Cold enough day to make a young man
weep, afternoon when everything,
or nothing, changed forever. The dead
rapper grunted, the bassline faded,
my spirits whispered something
from the trees. I left, then lost the pistol
in a storm drain, somewhere between
that life and this. Left the pistol in
a storm drain, but never got around
to wiping away the prints.
from The Common
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE
* * *
You Are Your Own State Department
Each day I miss Japanese precision. Trying to arrange things
the way they would. I miss the call to prayer
at Sharjah, the large collective pause. Or
the shy strawberry vendor with rickety wooden cart,
single small lightbulb pointed at a mound of berries?
