Read The Best American Poetry 2015 Online
Authors: David Lehman
When the cherry moon smiles
they thrust under their heads
Under the water the Prince sick up
the old worries Under the water
worry sacks rise empty again
It takes a worried man
the Prince say
to sing a worried song
while beneath the surface of Lake Minnetonka
the perch in the shoals
and the gobies in their holes
nibble at the worries
our skimmed from the top worries
scraped from the bottom worries
spooned from the middle good enough worries
There's worries now
the fish sing
but there won't be worries long
from
The Awl
It's very easy to get.
Just keep living and you'll find yourself
getting more and more of it.
You can keep it or pass it on,
but it's a good idea to keep a small portion
for those nights when you're feeling so good
you forget you're human. Then drudge it up
and float down from the ceiling
that is covered with stars that glow in the dark
for the sole purpose of being beautiful for you,
and as you sink their beauty dims and goes outâ
I mean it flies out the nearest door or window,
its whoosh raising the hair on your forearms.
If only your arms were green, you could have two small lawns!
But your arms are just there and you are kaput.
It's all your fault, anyway, and it always has beenâ
the kind word you thought of saying but didn't,
the appalling decline of human decency, global warming,
thermonuclear nightmares, your own small cowardice,
your stupid idea that you would live foreverâ
all
tua culpa
. John Philip Sousa
invented the sousaphone, which is also your fault.
Its notes resound like monstrous ricochets.
But when you wake up, your body
seems to fit fairly well, like a tailored suit,
and you don't look too bad in the mirror.
Hi there, feller!
Old feller, young feller, who cares?
Whoever it was who felt guilty last night,
to hell with him. That was then.
from Poem-a-Day
Strip thirty good-sized leaves.
Wash them, and pat dry.
Paint the leaves with egg white
and dredge in fine sugar.
Let stand upon a wire rack.
Buber writes, “man's final objective is this:
to become, himself, a lawâa Torah.”
The granules glimmer upon the mint,
hard dew, a glittery,
sweet finish to a fine night
and a flourless chocolate cake
with a little raspberry sauce.
I know that it's my job, but Rabbi, I worry
because I like worrying,
and I admire the persistence of the mint,
really just a weed: spicy, ragged, alive.
To grow toward the sunâit's like listeningâ
and who doesn't need to aspire?
Yes, Rabbi, the lesson's true:
to become a law means to know God,
but who could be ready for that?
Rabbi, try the candied mint: it's heaven.
from
The Carolina Quarterly
The bar was called The Den of Iniquity,
or maybe The Cadillac Loungeâwhatever
it was, its sign was a neon martini glass,
or a leg ending in stiletto. Maybe a parrot. Anyway,
in that place I danced without anyone
touching me but seven men watched
from the bar with embered, truculent eyes.
Or I danced with my boyfriend's hands
hot around my ribs. Or I didn't have a boyfriend
and no one was looking and my dance moves
were nervous, sick-eel-ish, and eventually
I just sat down. What I remember for sure
is that was the night I drank well gin
and spun myself into a terrible headache.
That was the night I thought I was pregnant
and drank only club soda. That was
the night I made a tower from Rolling Rock
bottles sometime after midnight
and management spoke to me quietly
but only after snapping a Polaroid
for the bathroom Wall of Fame. In any case,
when I finally stumbled or strode
or snuck outside, the air was Austin-thick,
Reno-dry, Montpellier-sharp. I don't remember
if my breath clouded or vanished
or dropped beneath the humidity. I don't remember
if the music pulsing from inside
was the Velvet Underground or Otis Redding
or the local band of mustached banjo men.
You know this poem has a gimmick,
and you're right. But understand: if I wrote
Cadillac Lounge, boyfriend
,
beer tower, soul
it would be suddenly true, a memory lit
by lightning flash. Who needs that sort
of confinement? If the way forward
is an unbending line, let the way back
be quicksilver, beading and re-swirling. Forgive
the trick and let me keep this mix-and-match,
this willful confusion of bars, of beaches,
of iced overpasses and hands on my hands,
all the films with gunfights, all the films
with dogs, the Kandinsky, the Rembrandt,
the moment the moon's face snapped
into focus, the moment I learned
the word
truculent
, each moment the next
and the one before, and in this blur,
oh, how many lifetimes I can have.
from
Pleiades
At the weigh-in
on the morning of March 24th, 1962, the World Welterweight Champ,
Benny “Kid” Paret,
called his challenger, Emile Griffith, a
maricón
â
Cuban slang for “faggot”â
and smiled. Emile wanted to knock the Kid out right there.
Gil Clancy, his manager,
managed to hold him back, told him to “save it for tonight.”
The New York Times
wouldn't print the correct translation, maintained that Paret had called
Emile an “unman.”
The sportswriter Howard Tuckner raved against the euphemistic
copy editors, “A butterfly
is an unman. A rock is an unman. These lunatics!”
No one would mention
the word “homosexual” in connection with a star
athlete. Another
journalist, Jimmy BreslinâIrish straight-talkerâsaid,
“That was what Paret
was looking to doâget him steamed! If you're going to look for trouble,
you found it!”
By the twelfth round, both men had tired. They clinched, heads ear
to ear, embracing,
then punching underneath, whaling away at the other's
ribs, face. Such
intimate hostility. As if, could they have spoken to each other
through plastic mouth guards,
they would have groaned out curses, endearments, pillow talk.
At the close of the sixth round
the Kid had landed a combination, ending in a hard right
to Emile's chin.
He had gone down in his corner for an eight count,
but got back up
and started slugging as the bell rang and delivered him
from an almost certain
knockout. The crowd had shouted, whistled, roared.
In the black-and-white footage
of the TV broadcast on YouTube, the referee Ruby Goldstein breaks up
their clinch. Photographers
lean in and slide their old-fashioned flash-bulb cameras across the ring's
sweat-spattered
canvas floor to get a closer shot of the exhausted fighters. Cigarette
and cigar smoke
hangs heavy. The announcer Don Dunphy complains, “This is probably
the tamest round
of the entire fight.” One second later Emile staggers the Kid
with an overhand right.
“Griffith rocks him.” Emile lands twenty-nine punches in eighteen
seconds. “Paret against
the ropes, almost hopeless.” Emile steps back, winds up, then swings
to get his full
body weight into each punch. Eyewitness Norman Mailer, ten feet
away from the fighters,
would write that Emile's right hand was “whipping like a piston rod
which had broken through
the crankcase, or like a baseball bat demolishing a pumpkin.”
The crowd screams,
frenzied as piranhas stripping in less than half a minute the flesh
from a cow fallen
into the river. As Emile hammers the Kid's head with nine straight uppercuts
in two seconds, so it whips
back and forth in the slow-motion replay like a ragdoll's head shaken
by a girl throwing
a tantrum, one commentator observes, “That's beautiful
camera work,
isn't it?” Another responds, “Yeah, terrific.” While Emile mauls
the Kid with mechanical
precision, he may be thinking of how the Kid reached out
and tauntingly patted
his left buttock, lisping
Maricón, maricón
, as Emile stood
stripped down
to his black trunks on the scales at the weigh-in. Or he may be thinking
of his job designing ladies'
hats in the Garment District. Attach that ostrich feather to the brim
of the blue boater, left hook,
pile-driver right. Lean into the punch. Put him away. But Paret,
tangled in the ropes,
won't go down. Clancy had told him to keep punching until
the referee separated
them. Emile doesn't know that the Kid will never regain
consciousness, will die
in ten days. He doesn't know that for the rest of his life
he will have nightmares