The Best American Poetry 2014 (16 page)

Lie still, he says.

Like a dog on the beach

he starts digging

until the hole fills up with water.

He has already dug out two thighs of sand

when she finally asks, what's there,

convinced there's nothing.

There's nowhere he can kiss her where she hasn't already been kissed by the sun.

Every evening she goes to the ocean with her three sisters and their old father.

They strip in a row,

their bodies identical as in a paper garland.

Bodies that make you think of women constantly chopping vegetables

—it is like living by the train station,

their father swears—

and always putting the last slice into their mouths.

For her, there is not even a knife left in the whole house.

The sound of a cuckoo limps across the dunes.

She takes a beam of sunlight sharpened side by side with stones

and cuts with it

and you can tell her vegetables from the others'

by how they burn.

By now they already stand wrapped in cocoons of white towels,

her teeth, crossed out by a blue line of lips, chatter,

scratching the grains of salt. Her bitten tongue

bleeds out into the mouth a red oyster,

which she gulps, breathless.

Their father turns away to dry his cock,

but the girls rub their breasts and crotches openly,

their hands skilled at wiping tables,

their heads as big as the shadow of the early moon,

their nipples as big as the shadows of their heads,

and black so that their milk might look even whiter.

She, too, is rough and indifferent toward her full breasts,

as if she were brushing a cat off the chair

for her old father to sit down.

They drink beer in the northern light that illuminates nothing but itself.

Sailboats slip off their white sarafans

baring their scrawny necks and shoulders,

and line up holding on to the pier as if it were a dance bar.

It bothers her, what did he find there after all?

So she touches herself under the towel.

It is easy to find where he has been digging—

the dug-up spot is still soft.

The water is flat like fur licked down by a clean animal.

A bird, big even from afar,

believes the ocean is its egg.

So the bird sits on the ocean patiently

and feels it kick slightly now and then.

from
New Letters

I'm seeing lots of dead zebras lately

on floors of elegant homes pictured in

interior decorator magazines.

WE PROUDLY HARVEST RAINWATER
—a sign

in a neighbor's yard. With a deep barrel

I could humbly and thankfully harvest rain.

Several homeowners organize a neighbor-

hood watch patrol after discovering used

rubbers discarded on their lawns.

Folded cardboard tent-shaped trap

hanging among dark leaves of the lemon tree

to capture the galling Mediterranean fly.

A profusion of oleanders—to beautify

the freeway and filter the air, though

leaf, stem, and blossom are all poison.

Dried-out snake on the road

I brought as a curiosity to the child—

who insisted we give it a proper funeral.

Urban tumbleweed, some people call it,

discarded plastic bag we see in every city

blown down the street with vagrant wind.

from
The Harvard Review

If the best thing the world discovered today is that at the inside

of the universe is a cat

I love your braids; I love your peaceful eating

I hate that the sum total effect of the schedule

was sadness. Do you read the schedule. Nope.

I'm jealous. If he used the same words

over and over in plays and movies and commencement

addresses is that wrong. Is it wrong. What if art is wrong.

Is there only one sun. Some planets have two.

When the rain was pouring I wanted to be in there

silent with you. In the dog's beady black gaze. In the room

with the sleeping dog. With you leaving the room.

I've stopped the rain, I've silenced you.

I think the story was that one woman had gotten

the painting from the other and they were dating

but she never paid for it and then she moved out.

The painting sat in the second floor window and the painter

saw it and demanded it back. No. So the painter wrote

Marie O'Shea give me back my painting and put

it in the window opposite. She's a mess. We call her

cunt face. Twat. When it blasted I asked you to put

your headphones on. The dog's wheezing. I think

smack in the middle of that time was a virus

and it gave itself to everyone freely. We learned that

everything was related to everything else. Just as everything

was getting more separate and no longer a simple bowl

of fruit everyone was dying of the same thing. Not everyone.

Later when they hit the buildings it was just like everyone

in the city felt it. Not the same. We felt the shake. The request

in the air was how are we all feeling it now. It wasn't the same.

It was like you kept breaking off another square of the

bar and tasting it. He came running back into the room.

He was
moaning
. And now he just stares. And the rain

starts up again. I've never been invited to one meeting.

Do they have them. I remember the time I was invited

and we went around the room saying how we came

to be here. I was invited and everyone

stared and they never let me know when they were

meeting again. She wore a yellow dress. Everyone's watching you. He stands

in the doorway watching you eat. It stopped.

I want the painting in the window. Yeah. And you can

really ask her questions when you get her alone. And you were reading all the

time. And you said it a lot, that you wanted one which

you don't remember. I guess I wanted one. Now some

people in that mysterious time there it goes again

decided to in a very dedicated way begin talking about it

because there wasn't enough of that. That part had waned. Otherwise

you could just take it off the walls, you could go to funerals

and get fucked. You could recite it so that all they saw

was you. Huge numbers of them banded together marching

slowly into the room. There's footage of us dancing. I wouldn't ask

the stars to be quiet but I'm closer to them now. She was so

smart. I'm serious. I bet she'd make a good one. Since I didn't grow

my own I'd like to see what she'd make me. If he demands that no

one tells theirs at the breakfast table I think he probably pulls

it out of his pajamas and slaps it on the table. Dreams to me are

always receding. It's the only perfection: it's vanishing, stoking my

appetite so I'm drawing it for you as it becomes less the experience

that just happens as I'm resurrecting it for you. I'm making it

for you. I'm asking her. Make it for me. I'd like that. I'm putting it

in real deep. Out there, where everyone is.

from
Green Mountains Review

“So you're saying there is no self?” I asked the doctor.

“Well . . .” he said. He took off his glasses and breathed

on the lens—for a moment an extraordinary radiance

hardened there, then he flicked it with his cuff.

He coughed, painfully, and swallowed hard.

At once you heard the other patients bickering

along their waxed corridors, and I counted myself

lucky to be alone with the master surgeon,

the one whose lab coat bulges with key rings.

Perhaps this
I
who still speaks

was just the experience

of watching snow fly in a dim window?

That might be a great happiness.

When the head rose, I rose also, when he pulled on

his gray calfskin gloves, I rubbed raw knuckles,

braced for the wind that blows from the mind itself.

from
FIELD

Ninety-five years before he died,

Stanley found an abandoned kitten

in the woods of Worcester. Stanley's father

had drunk Drano in a public park, while

Stanley had still been turning, a nebula

slowly taking human form

inside his mother. And when he found

the lost cat, he took it home

and gave it a box in the attic, under

the stars where his father was wheeling, and he raised

his feline companion—I don't know girl

or boy—without his mother much noticing,

hard as she worked, silent as she kept.

And his pet grew, and when they got to the woods he would

take off the collar and leash and they would

frolic together, she-he/he-she would

teach Stanley, already sinuous,

to slink and hunt. And I don't know who it

was who suddenly saw that Stanley's

companion, growing stronger and bigger and

lither, was a bobcat, and none of us

was there the night Stanley released her-him

or there when it rose in him, the desire

to seek a feline of his own species.

And when he was 98, and Elise

had gone ahead, leaving her words and

images behind her, casting the skin of them,

I saw, in a city in Ohio, an elegant

shaving-brush-soft replica bobcat,

and brought it back to West 12th, along with the

usual chocolates, and flowers, and a demo of my