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

thrashing
    bodies, the surface almost writhing with their gleams, the sound
    of water laughing all around, and then they disappeared again,
    the water like a shadow, deep, blue-green. And quiet. There was
    a small breeze, an open field, a white clapboard building
    on one side. Things are simple, that’s what we forget.
    When I slept that night I left the door ajar for Henry
    who would come upstairs late for his vigil, the warm air
    floating above the vent from some underworld
    benevolent beyond his dreams. And when I woke later in the dark
    as sometimes you do in a strange bed away from home
    in a strange town with a moon and trees, I could feel he was there
    long before I could distinguish his shape, before I could remember
    exactly where I was. It came to me this loneliness is something we take
    with us anywhere and not that we aren’t loved, but that we aren’t
    loved forever. Life demands much less. The fish is purely
    fish and that’s enough. An apple wholly apple. Maybe it’s enough
    to be human, leave the door open, wait for a soul—which, if it comes, comes
    like the half of the conversation we imagined because we
    can’t imagine that speaking is only speaking, even to the night,
    the way we can’t believe death is only death, the way we can’t
    stand outside a window on a fall evening in a pile of leaves in Kalamazoo
    and not count ourselves among the missing. Are you single and looking
    for your soul mate? Are you drowning in credit card debt?
    Do you want more hair? Do you have trouble sleeping? Yes,
    I have trouble sleeping. But, when it was my turn, I cupped my hand
    and the machine filled it with food for the fish I scattered
    over the water and they came like the rush of fat rain up
    from the deep, glittering, swarming over nothing. It made me happy.
    Then the green silence closing over them again. The little cat
    waiting faithfully in the dark for his death and not complaining.
    And us, knowing it is already a world without us, already a pond,
    a cat, an orchard stuck with swords of light—
    but the heart needs no reason for the belovéd.
    from Plume

TERRANCE HAYES
New Jersey Poem

    after Willie Cole’s Malcolm’s Chicken I
    One of the many Willies I know wants me to know
    there are still bits of hopefulness being made
    in certain quarters of New Jersey. It’s happening
    elsewhere too, obviously, this Willie would say,
    but have you seen the pants sagging like the skin
    on a famished elephant and the glassy stupor
    of counselors in the consultation rooms, the trash
    bins of vendettas and prescriptions, have you seen
    the riot gear, what beyond hope could be a weapon
    against all that? The summer I drove six hours and
    some change to Willie’s place I found him building
    a huge chicken out of brooms, wax, marbles (for eyes),
    Styrofoam, and hundreds of matchsticks, but what
    I remember is the vague sorrow creasing his face.
    Like it wasn’t a chicken at all at hand, like he’d never
    even seen a chicken in New Jersey, or a feather
    or drumstick—which I know to be untrue. A man can be
    so overwhelmed it becomes a mode of being,
    a flavor indistinguishable from spit. He hadn’t done shit
    with the letters and poems his wife left behind
    when she killed herself. I think she was running,
    I think she was being chased. She is almost floating
    below ground now. The grave is filled with floodwater,
    the roots of trees men planted after destroying the trees
    shoot through her hips. Nowadays when I want saltwater
    taffy or some of those flimsy plastic hooks good for hanging
    almost nothing, I do not go to New Jersey. And I’m sure
    no one there misses me with all the afflictions they have
    to attend. Grief will boil your eyeballs if you let it.
    It is possible to figure too much, to look too much,
    to be too verbal, so pigheaded nothing gets done.
    In those days, that particular Willie denied he was
    ever lonely in New Jersey. His head, he