Read The Best American Poetry 2015 Online
Authors: David Lehman
alone and twenty-three. Some weekends I drive
to KC, where a woman who won't need me
lets me stay over, though at sex I'm still a boy,
the way at writing I'm still naïve, unskilled,
fascinated by form but lazy about content.
I'd like to finally read what I've been quoting.
Rummaging after maturity, I overdo the easy
and am too timid to engage full heart.
But I work the paths that may lead from myself.
Ike stays a boy, boyishly winning the worst war.
As president little happened we praise him for,
and by
we
I mean the characters of my novel,
among the adult troubles they fall into
and I don't understand. I avoid addressing
tyranny and battlefield and Holocaust.
For years I write liner notes to real life.
All drafts of that story will leave the earth,
and I'll send gratitude to the devil of fortune,
who will let that manuscript drift
like a bad vapor through offices of agent and editor.
This summer at the Democratic Party Convention
in Chicago, where the man who gives
Leaves of Grass
away carelessly will be renominated, the delegates
keep doing the Macarena every time I look.
The vice president claims during his speech
to be doing the Macarena, but does not move,
then offers to demonstrate it again. Presidents
are always late in the day of their time.
Like dances, our political lives come and go.
It's the summer of all dances, coffee leaping
in the percolator, gravity-defiant solitude,
and through the window, houses and fields
seduced in their own passing crazes
of seasons, life and death that won't need me.
from
Fruita Pulp
The washing machine door broke. We hand-washed for a week.
Left in the tub to soak, the angers began to reek,
And sometimes when we spoke, you said we shouldn't speak.
Pandora was a bride;Â the gods gave her a jar
But said don't look inside. You know how stories areâ
The can of worms denied? It's never been so far.
Whatever the gods forbid, it's sure someone will do.
And so Pandora did, and made the worst come true.
She peeked under the lid, and out all trouble flew:
Sickness, war, and pain, nerves frayed like fretted rope,
Every mortal bane with which Mankind must cope.
The only thing to remain, lodged in the mouth, was Hope.
Or so the tale assertsâ and who am I to deny it?
Yes, out like black-winged birds the woes flew and ran riot,
But I say that the woes were words, and the only thing left was quiet.
from
The Atlantic Monthly
by the age of nine  you knew everything  tra-la
had met two Presidents  tra-la  could explain pi
memorize Shakespeare soliloquies
or checkmate anyone blind-folded  child's play
violin  oboe  harpsichord  duplicate bridge
so what  then  was left to do
cut corners  fit in  marry someone
polish silver  slap your children  or go back
back to one  tra-la  then two and so forth
'til you learn to love all that blooms in the spring
from
Denver Quarterly
after Hurricane Sandy & 3 nights of no power
In the delicatessen a last avocado.
Black, pulpyâa kind of soft grenade.
I set it down
for probably nobody.
I step outânot through doors
but through clear plastic tatters
shimmering in a doorframe.
Hothouse roses on the shelves outside;
hyacinths in foiled cups.
*
Calling storms by dumb namesâ
not the shabbiest way of neutering disaster,
I think.
Like the pit bull called Cuddles,
the Lover's Lane near the sewage treatment plantâ
Even
All Saints' Day
,
when you think about it.
Today, when I say,
I have it good
,
meaning,
better than others
,
& the children screaming
Help
then
Made you look
, meaning
We tricked youâ
*
But hyacinths in November!
You should see them!
Hyacinths make roses ridiculous by contrast.
Just look at the roses
hyperventilating in their cellophane shawlsâ
Pluck their cat claws & they don't object . . .
I want to grab someone passing & ask
the riddle that flowers won't answerâ
how much beauty
comes from never saying no?
*
Maybe someone
will
answer me.
That's why I keep my mouth shut.
*
But not the sour-mouthed cashierâ
she handles the bills,
she carelessly dabs the lemon wedge
she keeps by the side of the register.
Never a word from her.
Maybe the balances chafe
the tongue as well as the fingers.
She doesn't need to keep an eye peeledâ
the cameras do it all.
If I could teach one art, it
would be how to go home unanswered,
empty-handedâ
*
But what about the sidewalk Cyclops,
the all-seeing tattoo on the bald guy's head,
who once, I swear, called me by my right name,
who saw me frowning in sunlightâ
That & this so bad, Tyrell, you ain't
seen the darkest yet . . .
The subway's closed tonightâ
what darkest dark can he guard now?
*
I think I'd grow to like itâ
the terrible wisdom
of stillness. The stomach, unchurning,
hollow as a prop.
The circles moving around them,
the cashier & the Cyclops.
The flowers too, if they can
reckon up anything besides their own mutilation.
Maybe they can sense
the babies wheeling by at warp speed . . .
who seem too light, having
little to them, or too muchâan eye,
a name, some inarticulate rage,
all that's needed to be called a storm.
*
And what's a blackout, Tyrell?
Afraid of roaches?
Maybe you'll make some new friends
.
*
And why hyacinths, why November?
Why rooted, not cut through, uncovered,
combining two colors?
Celestial blue, arterial purple,
maybe earth thinking both of heaven
& the blood in the sexesâ
Thinking not only of a man-boy
turned into something beautifully inhuman
because a god looked at him once
but also picturing women
who know how to hide,
the woman in the jungle camp called
Hyacinth?
76, secreting herself
under a cot while the cult leader
in the pavilion makes nine hundred others
lie on the ground one last time,
& they won't rise again,
the cups on the ground like white flowers.
The toxins, red and purple in the cups,
around the roses of their mouths.
& Hyacinth who knows how to hide,
how to wait for the last to drink
even as the writer of the last note
summons those particulars
that are terrible for being so ordinaryâ
a gray sky, a dog barking,
a bird on a telephone wire.
White night, the leader calls it.
Stepping over the people on the groundâ
Hyacinth & the moon
can rise in the white, humid night.
*
November then;
November now.
A kind of soft grenade
I set down for probably nobody.
Would I eat the goddamn flowers
if I thought they'd answer?
Made you look is all we can say
from
The Iowa Review
like a lagoon,
like a canoe,
like you
are part earth
and part moon,
like déjà -vu,
like you
had never been
to the outer brink
or the inner Louvre,
like hay,
like air,
like your mother
just this morning
had combed a dream
into your hair,
like you
had never heard
a sermon or
a harsh word,
like a fool,
like a pearl,
like you
are new to the world.
from
The New Criterion