The Best American Poetry 2013 by David Lehman Read Free Book Online

that way.” I crouch to wipe my stoic’s face with my sweat-wet sweatshirt, her fingers in my hair, she bites at it, flops back on linoleum. “It’s talking and dead,” she says, fascinated. Me exasperated. “I’ll buy you a new one.” Here’s the debacle. I can’t push the fridge back. It sits, an abandoned barracks in the pale field of the kitchen. A sigh, trickle, a cracking sound. “Why does everything die?” Her anger. “Why do I have to die.” A spike of outrage as faint buzzing not all that furious under the refrigerator fails to finish, as, like a glacier calving, freezer ice falls free.
    The poem’s narrow shape actually resembles an icebox . . .
    Camille Paglia on William Carlos Williams’s “This Is Just to Say”
    from The American Poetry Review

AMY GERSTLER
Womanishness

    The dissonance of women. The shrill frilly silly
    drippy prissy pouty fuss of us. And all the while science
    was the music of our minds. We fretted about god’s
    difficulties with intimacy as we polished our breastplates,
    darned our nighties, sprawled on front porches
    waiting for the locksmith to come and change the locks.
    Our ambitions glittered like tinsel. Our minds grabbed at
    whatever rushed by, like sea anemones at high tide.
    Hush, hush my love. All these things happened
    a long time ago. You needn’t be afraid of them now.
    from Court Green

LOUISE GLÜCK
Afterword

    Reading what I have just written, I now believe
    I stopped precipitously, so that my story seems to have been
    slightly distorted, ending, as it did, not abruptly
    but in a kind of artificial mist of the sort
    sprayed onto stages to allow for difficult set changes.
    Why did I stop? Did some instinct
    discern a shape, the artist in me
    intervening to stop traffic, as it were?
    A shape. Or fate, as the poets say,
    intuited in those few long ago hours—
    I must have thought so once.
    And yet I dislike the term
    which seems to me a crutch, a phase,
    the adolescence of the mind, perhaps—
    Still, it was a term I used myself,
    frequently to explain my failures.
    Fate, destiny, whose designs and warnings
    now seem to me simply
    local symmetries, metonymic
    baubles within immense confusion—
    Chaos was what I saw.
    My brush froze—I could not paint it.
    Darkness, silence: that was the feeling.
    What did we call it then?
    A “crisis of vision” corresponding, I believed,
    to the tree that confronted my parents,
    but whereas they were forced
    forward into the obstacle,
    I retreated or fled—
    Mist covered the stage (my life).
    Characters came and went, costumes were changed,
    my brush hand moved side to side
    far from the canvas,
    side to side, like a windshield wiper.
    Surely this was the desert, the dark night.
    (In reality, a crowded street in London,
    the tourists waving their colored maps.)
    One speaks a word: I.
    Out of this stream
    the great forms—
    I took a deep breath. And it came to me
    the person who drew that breath
    was not the person in my story, his childish hand
    confidently wielding the crayon—
    Had I been that person? A child but also
    an explorer to whom the path is suddenly clear, for whom
    the vegetation parts—
    And beyond, no longer screened from view, that exalted
    solitude Kant perhaps experienced
    on his way to the bridges—
    (We share a birthday.)
    Outside, the festive streets
    were strung, in late January, with exhausted Christmas lights.
    A woman leaned against her lover’s shoulder
    singing Jacques Brel in her thin soprano—
    Bravo! the door is shut.
    Now nothing escapes, nothing enters—
    I hadn’t moved. I felt the desert
    stretching ahead, stretching (it now seems)
    on all sides, shifting as I speak,
    so that I was constantly
    face to face with blankness, that
    stepchild of the sublime,
    which, it turns out,
    has been both my subject and my medium.
    What would my twin have said, had my