The Best American Poetry 2012 (6 page)

from
New England Review

FRANK BIDART

Of His Bones Are Coral Made

He still trolled books, films, gossip, his own

past, searching not just for

ideas that dissect the mountain that

in his early old age he is almost convinced

cannot be dissected:

he searched for stories:

stories the pattern of whose

knot dimly traces the pattern of his own:

what is intolerable in

the world, which is to say

intolerable in himself,
ingested, digested:

the stories that

haunt each of us, for each of us

rip open the mountain.

*

the creature smothered in death clothes

dragging into the forest

bodies he killed to make meaning

the woman who found that she

to her bewilderment and horror

had a body

*

As if certain algae

that keep islands of skeletons

alive, that make living rock from

trash, from carcasses left behind by others,

as if algae

were to produce out of

themselves and what they most fear

the detritus over whose

kingdom they preside: the burning

fountain is the imagination

within us that ingests and by its

devouring generates

what is most antithetical to itself:

it returns the intolerable as

brilliant dream, visible, opaque,

teasing analysis:

makes from what you find hardest to

swallow, most indigestible, your food.

from
Salmagundi

BRUCE BOND

Pill

Say you are high all the time save those moments

you take a sobriety tablet and so descend

the nerves of the heart, thinking straight,

they call it, as if the mind were an arrow

shot from the eye into the eyes of others,

the ones you wronged, the ones you never knew

you love or do not love, the black fathoms

of their pupils deepening as your eyes close.

And sure it hurts, how something dead walks out

your sleep, how it goes from blue to red

like blood. And yet the stuff keeps calling you

in a father's voice. You loved your father,

so it's more than bitter seeds you swallow.

It's quiet pleasure within the limitations

of one life, until the great space of a day

gets wider, brighter, as if you were slipping

into summer with its giant measures

of desire, the way just sitting makes it rise.

And yes, with each dose comes the gravity

and boredom, the slow crush of August heat,

though you are learning to live here, in a town

with one good street to speak of, one flock of trees

to storm the night. In time you are addicted.

And it takes more of the drug to get you back

to the world, where morning swallows flit

in last night's rain. In time you tell yourself

you are the age you are: the little pains

inside your arms, your legs, they are just that:

the pinch that says you are not asleep,

that the compulsion you feel is the pull

of the planet you walk, alone. And the dawn,

however deep you breathe, is everyone's now,

everyone's breath in the sky above you,

everyone's sun aching into layers

of mist, spitting fire in the eye,

its one black star dissolving, like a pill.

from
Colorado Review

STEPHANIE BROWN

Notre Dame

I was staying in an apartment near Notre Dame.

There was a park for the kids to play.

Roller skaters in front of the cathedral in the evening, and my older son joined in.

We shared the floor of the apartment.

Too many family members of mine sleeping there.

One morning I woke up and in the instant

Before my full vision came back I saw or apprehended or felt or however

You want to call that almost-seeing that happens—

Two angels hovering: one was male and one was female.

They were there to be with my younger son, protecting him or visiting.

The male especially was there to care for him.

They were checking on him as he slept.

I had interrupted by seeing them and so they had to leave.

In fact, the male angel stayed maybe a moment too long

And the female was communicating this message like, “Hurry up, come on!”

It was known to me that I wasn't supposed to see them.

They were annoyed with me.

After waking, fully, and lying on the floor before everyone else stirred,

My mind wandered over to Notre Dame:

My parents made a pilgrimage every year, just to be near it.

I loved the thoughtful gargoyle up at the top.

Inside the human souls came to visit out of pain or tourism

Or death approaching, or craving union,

Out of loneliness and sickness. Out of boredom.

Candles burned their prayers for someone.

What had I seen? Anything? You always doubt something like that.

How could that be real? And yet

It was a terrible summer, and it required angels, real or dreamed,

With my father losing his mind, getting lost;

My mother losing the ability to walk,

A sister comforting me as I lamented and talked

My sad story while our children played together at the playground

At the Tuileries. Later, when I could laugh again

And tell the summer as a tale, I said that

It's sad to walk around the Seine when you are getting divorced while everyone else

Is kissing and filming their honeymoons or new loves. Even

My husband, after we got back together, laughed at that.

Because he, too, had been heartsick on another part of the planet.

from
The American Poetry Review

ANNE CARSON

Sonnet of Exemplary Sentences From the Chapter Pertaining to the Nature of Pronouns in Emile Benveniste's
Problems in General Linguistics
(Paris 1966)