The Best American Poetry 2012 (9 page)

If the imagined woman makes the real woman

seem bare-boned, hardly existent, lacking in

gracefulness and intellect and pulchritude,

and if you come to realize the imagined woman

can only satisfy your imagination, whereas

the real woman with all her limitations

can often make you feel good, how, in spite

of knowing this, does the imagined woman

keep getting into your bedroom, and joining you

at dinner, why is it that you always bring her along

on vacations when the real woman is shopping,

or figuring the best way to the museum?

And if the real woman

has an imagined man, as she must, someone

probably with her at this very moment, in fact

doing and saying everything she's ever wanted,

would you want to know that he slips in

to her life every day from a secret doorway

she's made for him, that he's present even when

you're eating your omelette at breakfast,

or do you prefer how she goes about the house

as she does, as if there were just the two of you?

Isn't her silence, finally, loving? And yours

not entirely self-serving? Hasn't the time come,

once again, not to talk about it?

from
The New Yorker

ELAINE EQUI

A Story Begins

The same as other stories, but we follow along in case something different might happen.

Just one different thing. It leads us to a ledge and pushes us over.

Every story has a climax in a way life doesn't.

It puts us back where it found us. It opens our eyes which weren't closed, but felt that way because what we saw was happening inside the story.

We are the excess of the story—that which it cannot contain.

Washed ashore.

What was the story about?

I can't remember. A dwindling, dim-witted tribe.

Every month when the moon was full, they'd sacrifice another virgin, but could never figure out why the crops still wouldn't grow.

from
New American Writing

ROBERT GIBB

Spirit in the Dark

What to make of the night we sat up late,

Listening to Beethoven's
Ninth

In that otherwise darkened apartment?

The New York Philharmonic

Was gathering together the fragments

At the fourth movement's start—

Momentum they'd ride like a wave

Through the fanfare and final chorus—

When we felt something else enter the air,

A front in the weather of the room.

It sat us upright on the edge of our chairs

While it tracked toward the record

And hung suspended for a measure or two

Above the still point of the stylus.

Then, just as steadily, it withdrew,

A patch of fog that had been burned off . . .

The look the dead raised on your face

Must have been the same on my own.

“What was that?” our expressions asked.

Decades later, I'd still like to know.

And what changes, if any, were played

Upon us? And did any of them take?

“Be embraced,” the chorus sang,

And then the crescendo and kettledrums,

The whole
Ninth
welling before us

Before fading as well from the room.

from
Prairie Schooner

KATHLEEN GRABER

Self-Portrait with No Internal Navigation

Have you ever been arrested? The pigeon arrests me.

No, not the wing but the sturdy round body & the sheen

of the throat, like the interior of a snail's shell or the bruise

of spring—think of the lilac blistered with blossoms,

of the burned grouse moor's sudden eruption into heather—

a beauty we expect only from what's broken. Have you ever

gone too far? Last week, I overshot the same junction twice

along a simple stretch of country road. And Philippe Petit

crossed eight times between The Towers. This is what

the officers at the station told him later when he was through.

He had no idea how long he'd hovered, how many times

he reversed himself, passing onto something almost

like earth beyond the far guy-wire, only to pivot back again—

lying down even, one leg dangling—above loose, swaying

space. I worry about the pigeons beginning today to roost

on the ferry that shuttles back & forth between two capes.

A pair of pigeons mates for a lifetime, produces, at most,

two squabs each year. They have chosen this spot because,

centuries ago, they were domestic—the words are
coop

&
columbarium
—because they still love, past reason,

the swift tides of our voices, are drawn to the chattering crew

even as it swats at them now with brooms & paints

the sooty pipes above the car deck with a chemical tar

concocted to burn the birds' feet. Once my husband chose

to step out into open air. He fell but was somehow returned

to me. Feral cousin of the carrier & racer, the rock dove steers

with a certainty we cannot imagine. Still, what if one flies

into the marsh for reeds for the nest just as the boat sets sail?

How will it know to simply sit & wait? And what of the panic

of the one departed? The one who has left without leaving.

from
Mead: The Magazine of Literature and Libations

AMY GLYNN GREACEN

Helianthus annuus
(Sunflower)

Irrational you may be, in the way

That mathematicians mean it. But you're all

About efficiencies, optimizations.

From apex to primordia, you spiral

Into control,
girasole
, you flower

Of the golden mean, the gyre, the twist, the curve.

Triumph of coincidence, master of packing

Density, attentiveness to detail.

And all this from a flower no one planted,

Arisen from last year's spillage from the birdhouse,