The Best American Poetry 2014 (6 page)

from
Hanging Loose

We are learning to control our thoughts,

to set obtrusive thoughts aside.

It takes an American

to do really big things.

Often I have no thoughts to push against.

It's lonely in a song

about outer space.

When I don't have any thoughts,

I want one!

A close-up reveals

that she has chosen

a plastic soap dish

in the shape of a giant sea turtle.

Can a thought truly be mine

if I am not currently thinking it?

There are two sides

to any argument;

one arm

in each sleeve.

*

Maybe I am always meditating,

if by that you mean

searching for a perfect

stranger.

from
A Public Space

Someone said we needed a breezeway

to bark down remnants of super storm Elias jugularly.

Alas it wasn't my call.

I didn't have a call or anything resembling one.

You see I have always been a rather dull-spirited winch.

The days go by and I go with them.

A breeze falls from a nearby tower

finds no breezeway, goes away

along a mission to supersize red shutters.

Alas if that were only all.

There's the children's belongings to be looked to

if only one can find the direction needed

and stuff like that.

I said we were all homers not homos

but my voice dwindled in the roar of Hurricane Edsel.

We have to live out our precise experimentation.

Otherwise there's no dying for anybody,

no crisp rewards.

Batman came out and clubbed me.

He never did get along with my view of the universe

except you know existential threads

from the time of the peace beaters and more.

He patted his dog Pastor Fido.

There was still so much to be learned

and even more to be researched.

It was like a goodbye. Why not accept it,

anyhow? The mission girls came through the woods

in their special suitings. It was all whipped cream and baklava.

Is there a Batman somewhere, who notices us

and promptly looks away, at a new catalog, say,

or another racing car expletive

coming back at Him?

from
The New Yorker

It's all
Romeo and Juliet
—

hate crimes, booty calls, political

assassinations.

Who's more Tybalt than the Blue Jay?

More Mercutio than the mockingbird?

That ibis pretending to be a lawn ornament

makes a vain and stupid prince.

Birds living in their city-states, flinging

mob hits from the sky, they drop their dead

half chewed at my gates. But give anything

even one lice-riddled wing and suddenly

we're symbolic, in league with the adult

collector of teddy bears, the best-addressed-

in-therapy pinned like a kitty-cat calendar in

every cubicle. Pathetic, really. With birds,

make no exception.

Alright. It's possible

I'll give you this morning's

mourning doves, there on the telephone

wire, apart from the hoi polloi—

something in their pink, the exact shade

of an aubade. And shouldn't we recall

that keen pheromonal terror, when dawn

arrives too bright, too soon? Let's hope we

never muster what God put in the goose's

head. For this,

you keep the doves.

from
The Normal School

—
Michael Faraday

I will never contain the whole of it, he said,

the mirror too small for the long-necked lamp

floating swan-like near the angle of incidence.

Never, he said, stepping back from the lectern

and long-necked lamp, the mirror he held too small

for the swan. To reflect the object entirely,

he said, stepping back to the lectern,

the glass must be half the source's height.

To reflect the object entirely—the lamp,

or a swan, or my figure before you—

the glass must be half the source's height.

Unlike thought, which easily triples the whole.

My figure before you, the lamp's swan,

reflects my object entirely; that is, unlike

thought, which easily triples—or transforms—the whole,

the mirror is bound by harmony.

Entirely. Unlike the object reflected.

Finally, when you back away from the glass, your image—

the mirror is bound by harmony—

always doubles the distance between you.

As it finally backs away through the glass,

light doubling its loss through angles of reflection,

your image doubles the distance between you—always

twice as far from the source as you are before it:

Like a thought doubly lost through an act of reflection

floating swan-like past its angle of incidence,

twice as far from its mate as a lamp from a mirror

that will never contain the whole of it.

from
The Atlantic

I, too, love the devil. He comes to my bed

all wrath and blessing and wearing

my husband's beard, whispers,
tell me who

you suspect.
He fools me the same way every time,

but never punishes me the same way twice.

I don't remember who I give him but he says

I have the instinct for red. Kiss red. Pleasure red.

Red of the ripe guaraná, of the jaguar's eyes

when it stalks the village at night. Red as the child

I birthed who breathed twice and died.

The stump of flesh where the head should be,

red. Pierced side of Christ, red. A sinner needs

her sin, and mine is beloved. Mine returns

with skin under his fingernails, an ice cube

on his tongue, and covers my face with a hymnal.

I never ask for a miracle, only strength enough

to bear his weight. Each day, I hang laundry

on the line, dodge every shadow. Each night

he crawls through the window, I pay with a name.

from
The Kenyon Review

Then, every letter opened was an oyster

Of possible bad news, pried apart to reveal

The imperfect probable pearl of your death.

Then, urgent messages still affrighted me, sharp

Noises caused the birds not yet in flight to fly.

Then, this was the life of you.

All your molecules

Gathered for your dying off

Like mollusks clinging to a great ship's hull.

Ceremony of wounds, tinned,

Tiny swaddled starlings soaked in brine.

A bird, singing in his wicker cage, winds down.

Now, a trestle table lined with wooden platters

Neat with feathered wings of quail tucked-in.

Until you sever the thing, from self, it feels.

Thereafter it belongs to none.

You have nothing to be afraid of, anymore.

Outside Prague, I find you warm

Among the million small gold bees set loose

In April's onion snow, quietly

Quietly, would you sing this back to me, out loud?

from
Boston Review