The Best American Poetry 2014 (9 page)

The text for today is early Miles, the Columbia years . . .

That tone pared down to essentials.

—Sekou Sundiata

“Did Miles mute his horn, because

a breeze can carry kites a gust might mutilate?”

Call him poet, professor. Call me shaky grasper of the chisel,

caught in a run-on rush to hammer it all.

The memory rushes in, frothing like a wave,

but recedes slowly as a blue crab across wet sand,

bright bits clasped in its claws.

Finally, finally, I come to believe in loss as a way of knowing.

How long does it take to hear what silence can say?

I stand at a stoplight, waiting for the colors to change.

At forty-five one has to deal with eyesight fading.

Not fading like blue from the knees of your favorite jeans

or lights on a stage above a silenced microphone,

but like a goateed poet in a stingy brim hat

covering the bets of a hooded man with holes for eyes

and scythes where his fingernails should be.

Finally, finally, I come to believe in loss as a way of knowing.

If the Blues is a river, doesn't it carry in and wash away?

LEDs are replacing halogen and incandescent lamps,

so the headlights of some approaching cars are slightly blue

as his velvet tone joins the voices of my fallen fathers.

And I tremble ever so softly, like a kite in a breeze

or the reed in a Harmon mute during a note's last linger.

Finally, finally . . . I come to believe in loss as a way of knowing.

from
Brilliant Corners

Haven't they moved like rivers—

like Glory, like light—

over the seven days of your body?

And wasn't that good?

Them at your hips—

isn't this what God felt when he pressed together

the first Beloved:
Everything.

Fever. Vapor. Atman. Pulsus. Finally,

a sin worth hurting for. Finally, a sweet, a

You are mine.

It is hard not to have faith in this:

from the blue-brown clay of night

these two potters crushed and smoothed you

into being—grind, then curve—built your form up—

atlas of bone, fields of muscle,

one breast a fig tree, the other a nightingale,

both Morning and Evening.

O, the beautiful making they do—

of trigger and carve, suffering and stars—

Aren't they, too, the dark carpenters

of your small church? Have they not burned

on the altar of your belly, eaten the bread

of your thighs, broke you to wine, to ichor,

to nectareous feast?

Haven't they riveted your wrists, haven't they

had you at your knees?

And when these hands touched your throat,

showed you how to take the apple
and
the rib,

how to slip a thumb into your mouth and taste it all,

didn't you sing out their ninety-nine names—

Zahir, Aleph, Hands-time-seven,

Sphinx, Leonids, locomotura,

Rubidium, August, and September—

And when you cried out,
O, Prometheans
,

didn't they bring fire?

These hands, if not gods, then why

when you have come to me, and I have returned you

to that from which you came—bright mud, mineral-salt—

why then do you whisper,
O, my Hecatonchire. My Centimani.

My hundred-handed one
?

from
The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day

Ned scrawls his self-delighted wild-boy trace

over the slopes of grass while I rest on a bench in the cemetery,

but we can't stay long,

it's a day I need to go into the city,

and when I stand up suddenly

my left leg's half a foot lower than my right,

because I've stepped into the sunken,

newly filled grave

of one Herbert Meyer. I don't know it then,

but that's when the wind blows up from beneath,

I think I'm just off balance, and make a joke of it later,

telling people my day began with falling into a grave,

and where can you go from there?

A few nights after

a storm blows down the moraine,

crisp and depth-charged with ozone and exhilaration,

chills my arms and face with that wind I've already met,

winds up the lanes and rattles the rose canes,

bends the beauty bush and Joe Pye weed down,

beautiful supplication,

the maple and walnut sway in the highest regions

of themselves, leaves circling in air

like the great curtain of bubbles blown by the humpback

to encircle the delicious schools—

Blows in my sleep

and blows while I'm cooking, blows while I read

and when I kiss does it ever blow then,

wind not particular to Mr. Meyer nor anyone else,

and thus the nervy thrill of its invitation: to be not at all

what you thought, unbound, to rush up

from the sinking earth on a gust of investigation:

now go be the crooked little house,

and the cracks in the shingles,

tunnel your hour as the mouse in the stale loaf,

fly back to the strong hands of the baker,

flour powdering a happy shroud

around the coursing veins in his forearms.

Spring backward into the wheat,

forward into the belly of the mouse-child

—what reason to ever end?

Well I know one:

if you don't hold still, you can have joy after joy,

but you can't stay anywhere to love.

That's the price, that rib-rattling wind

waiting to sweep you up,

that's the price the wind pays.

from
Ploughshares

Pray without speech. Bear witness walking

and dying slowly. In the whole universe

this one and only place which you have

made your very own. An instant of provocation

without the proper greeting. And down 6th street,

car alarms ululating. A fifth is your morning

medicine. A silhouette in chalk

on the sidewalk watches the children

run. Down and up Second Avenue

a red Monte Carlo, slows in an

old shark-skinned suit, the air

like furious birds. Someone leans against the brick wall

sharing a cigarette, blue-black under the fire escape.

Mrs. Janofsky's boy nods into his own hands.

The poor are many and so the women come

and go, bruises on their eyes like fake sapphires.

Men who never not hear the noise in their heads.

But not knowing the dead, roaming the streets

like feral cats, you hurl yourself into the oncoming traffic

of their eyes. Somewhere a search has been called off.

Whitecaps cover your mouth as you struggle

not to drown. You stick your fucking finger

in the socket. You cannot holler.

All the street assassins know you can break

a man's neck in a second flat; they grin

at their electronic palms. They enter and exit

through broken arteries. A razor left by the mirror.

The ghost lines of cocaine and tar,

along the boulevard beneath the diseased

elms. Someone wishes a lottery ticket with a nickel.

from
Spillway

Hell,

we just climbed. Reached the lip

and fell back, slipped

and started up again—

climbed to be climbing, sang

to be singing. It's just what we do.

No one bothered to analyze our blues

until everybody involved

was strung out or dead; to solve

everything that was happening

while it was happening

would have taken some serious opium.

Seriously: All wisdom

is afterthought, a sort of helpless relief.

So don't go thinking none of this grief

belongs to you: Even if

you don't know how it

feels to fall, you can get my drift;

and I, who live it

daily, have heard

that perfect word

enough to know just when

to use it—as in:

Oh hell. Hell, no
.

No—

this is hell
.

from
Poet Lore

Last week, a woman smiled at my daughter and I wondered

if she might have been the sort of girl my mother says spat on my aunt

when they were children in Virginia all those acts and laws ago.

Half the time I can't tell my experiences apart from the ghosts'.