Read The Best American Poetry 2015 Online
Authors: David Lehman
They're not all white faces, and this poem
is not a public poem.
Not all poems are meant to entertain,
like Jericho said, named
after that city by that river
in the hot place so many people
have lived in, so many hostages
been taken in, so many,
so manyâwhose offices I can't name or knowâ
no, not entertain, but sing just the same,
a polyphony of song
birds in the morning,
snow geese aflight, guns rocketing,
barrel out, sound through
the beating blood,
bleating animals, beseeching
all those river gods
for some respite from this suffering.
[Each a lawn weed having grown
up in some crevice,
against the wall of each life,
flowering heads all in all
and each in one, this explosion
on the seed-headed planet,
fractal imagining, and this
is my imagining, this declaimed
I
]
Though some of youâ
even though this is not a public poemâ
will say the I is dead; there is no self;
no things but in ideas
dead, yet no ideas in things either;
and then the accumulation
of linguistic artifacts heats up like a
like a like a
lava lamp.
[All Spencer's Gifts' glow and thrift store chic.]
And you will not be warmed by it,
but who is this
you
?
Because if there is no
I
,
there can be no
we
,
and I am not willing to surrender to that.
[to no
us-ness
, to you not being
one sole being on the other end
of this
this-ness
, but only part
of some conglomerate, corporate
entity called nothing-we-can-comprehend.
I am unwilling;
I am a dissenter.
I am
.]
Which renders the corporation something
more than
they
,
which is almost always paralytic or amoral,
certainly unsympathetic and unsympathizable,
something  approaching  evil.
Just you.  And me.  Please.
First, I claim this
I
, that only has this
language(s), technology(s), space,
time, sex, gender, religion
or lack thereof,
sensibility,    sense,
a body, a body in time,
in sex, in faith and betrayal
and reason and reasoning:
out of this great unsynthesized manifold,
all penetration and penetrating.
[Like a seed head blown apart,
all pollination and flowering
and dried and falling away
and lifting and airborne and borne
away from each other to land
and germinate and survive
in the meagerness of conditions,
the little dying, the little survivals.]
An image, Williams said; an idea, said Stevens,
ancestors we think of: lion's teeth leaves, prickly
and persevering, no things but in ideas, really?
So much depends upon this small boy
who doesn't look like any small boy you know;
he is my small boyâthe I of this
this-ness
â
with small bones and wide dark eyes,
hair as straight and black as spun obsidian.
So much depends upon a child like him, this one I love,
sitting in calf-high grass, so new-green, the edges
blaze white, and the dandelions all sprung overnight,
one night in this boy's newborn awareness,
as new as any child's, burying his face in the common
and undervalued florets, eyes blazing with YELLOW!!
Mind crackingâeverywhere this crackingâa portal
into a new way of being, the dancing around him,
the buzz of new insects, the spray of misting winds;
it is all so amazing, this world of wonder.
from
Verse Daily
bichwa ke mare ordhniya ke torde
,
tohar najariya jaherile jaherile
A scorpion stings me; its toxins swim my veins,
one ill prick from you and I writhe in your fever.
I dream I cough up a songbird I release to the sky,
you board a plane to take you across the desert.
I will tie messages to the feet of doves,
set them to sail at dusk with a map to your country.
Dizzy with thirst they fall, raining, from the sky,
their dried meat hardening in tawny feathers.
I throw stones at planes' shadows, cursing iron
to crash, to burn in serrated-leafed cane fields.
So my skin never blisters with your desire,
in birdbaths I empty vials of avicide.
The scorpion's sting tears my veil,
the glance from your poisonous eyes.
from
Prairie Schooner
I have faith in the single glossy capsule of a butterfly egg.
I have faith in the way a wasp nest is never quiet
and never wants to be. I have faith that the pile of forty
painted turtles balanced on top of each other will not fall
as the whole messy mass makes a scrabble-run
for the creek and away from a fox's muddy paws.
I have been thinking of you on these moonless nightsâ
nights so full of blue fur and needle-whiskers, I don't dare
linger outside for long. I wonder if scientists could classify
us a binary starâsomething like Albireo, four hundred
light-years away. I love that this star is actually twoâ
one blue, one gold, circling each other, never touchingâ
a single star soldered and edged in two colors if you spy it
on a clear night in July. And if this evening, wherever you are,
brings you face-to-face with a raccoon or possumâ
be careful of the teeth and all that wet bite.
During the darkest part of the night, teeth grow longer
in their mouths. And if the oleander spins you still
another wayâtake a turn and follow it. It will help you avoid
the spun-light sky, what singularity we might've become.
from Poem-a-Day
after Richard Rhodes
1
A man stood beside the gate
with his severed eyeball
in the palm of his hand.
The empty socket stared at me
with a shy creeping fire
or so I imagined in my pride.
So I said, “I can undo this.”
2
We watched the blast through welder's glass
and a tinted lens, from twenty miles east
in the Sierra Oscura. We slathered ourselves
with suntan lotion. Serber peeped
with a naked eye, and was blinded
for ninety secondsâwhen he could see again,
just chaparral and nine scrub pines.
The light had bounced off the moon
.
3
Neils Bohr recites in his soft rapt voice:
I divide myself into two persons, one of whom tries to fool the other, while a third, who is in fact the same as the other two, is filled with wonder at this confusion. Thinking becomes dramatic, and quietly acts the most complicated plots with itself and for itself; and the spectator again and again becomes an actor
.
4
The pile contains 771,002 pounds of graphite, 80,590 pounds of uranium oxide, 12,412 pounds of uranium metal, and took seventeen days to build. At 3:49 Fermi orders the control rods removed. At 3:53 he shuts the reaction down. It produced a half watt of energy, not enough to flicker a bulb, but the neutron intensity doubled every two minutes
.
5
The guard stood aside, the eye in his hand
flinched, I lowered my head,
when I crossed that threshold
I was back in childhood, a swing rocked,
a red ball bounced, the little ones
were jumping rope and chanting
the numbers, holy names
that stand for nothing except themselves.
Thorium is sequenced from that song,
radium and the transuranic elements.
Once or twice they clapped.
Then it was night, my father called me home,
by no name or voice, just darkness.
from
The Manhattan Review
There exist 54 Goldilocks planets
54 planets not too hot
54 planets not too cold
54 planets where the living
is juuuuuust right
in that particular planetary zone
54 planets like Earth
but not Earth Similar
not the same 54 planets close
but different Different
except for Prince
Assless Pants Prince
High-Heel Boots Prince
Purple Rain Prince
Paisley Park Prince
I Would Die For You
Prince
Ejaculating Guitar Prince
Jehovah's Witness Prince
Needs A New Hip Prince
Wrote
Slave
On His Face Prince
Took An Unpronounceable Symbol For His Name Prince
Chka Chka Chka Ahh
Prince
54 planets each with a Prince
and every Prince
exactly the same
as the one we know on Earth
54 lace 54 canes
54 planets 54 Prince
These 54 Prince swallow 54 worries
The 54 worries become 54 songs
54 songs made of 54 bars 54 bars
using 54 chords 54 downbeats
where they pick up the worries
54 offbeats to lay the worries down again
54 worried skank-beat Prince
birth 54 worrisome funk-drenched songs
Once an Earth year the Prince
gather around Lake Minnetonka