The Best American Poetry 2015 by David Lehman Read Free Book Online Page A

doublewide,
    Or the condo in Telluride,
    And doused with gasoline.
    They ride the candolescent flames,
    Just smoke now,
    Into a sky full of congratulations.
    from The Iowa Review

MADELYN GARNER
----
The Garden in August

    1.
    Afternoon brings my neighbor outside
    in her florid pink nightgown,
    exposed breasts like pendulums
    as she kneels in the gravel
    speaking to an empty planter. As the two of us
    wait in the kitchen
    for her children, it is clear
    her thoughts float
    from the back of the skull to the front.
    Unstoppered bottles. Pills on the table:
    blood pressure cholesterol diabetes arrhythmic heart
    dispensed out of sequence
    from the calendar of forgotten days.
    2.
    How resigned she seems
    to the eviction notices her body is receiving,
    the way a daughter sags against
    the door jamb.
    Family members speak in code
    about selling the house.
    3.
    Because she is a system of bone and blood
    Because her hands are rusted hinges
    Because wisps of spiderwebs float behind eyelids
    Because her heart leaks and something has palmed a piece of one lung
    Because her body is a test tube
    4.
    Tomorrow she will be outside again, offering
    up her sweat to the sun
    as she tends the perennials and
    sluices water, working her garden
    which is purpose, which is happiness—
    even as petal and pistil we fall.
    from PMS: poemmemoirstory

AMY GERSTLER
----
Rhinencephalon

    Your belly smells disheveled.
    Your armpits smell like kelp.
    Your genitals smell like lily flower soup
    (no MSG, please). You claim weedy
    scents of medicinal broth simmering
    for sick infants emanate from my neck,
    and that my recently doffed sox
    smell of nothing but lust. Could we
    sniff each other out, I wonder,
    blindfolded, from among the massed souls
    queuing up for free stew,
    or being shoved into box cars,
    or crouched under desks protecting
    our necks in disaster drills,
    or getting processed in tents at the edge
    of a refugee camp? Do we really want
    to pledge to enter heaven together
    and to live on there forever
    if heaven’s bereft of smell?
    from The American Poetry Review

LOUISE GLÜCK
----
A Sharply Worded Silence

    Let me tell you something, said the old woman.
    We were sitting, facing each other,
    in the park at ______, a city famous for its wooden toys.
    At the time, I had run away from a sad love affair,
    and as a kind of penance or self-punishment, I was working
    at a factory, carving by hand the tiny hands and feet.
    The park was my consolation, particularly in the quiet hours
    after sunset, when it was often abandoned.
    But on this evening, when I entered what was called the Contessa’s Garden,
    I saw that someone had preceded me. It strikes me now
    I could have gone ahead, but I had been
    set on this destination; all day I had been thinking of the cherry trees
    with which the glade was planted, whose time of blossoming had nearly ended.
    We sat in silence. Dusk was falling,
    and with it came a feeling of enclosure
    as in a train cabin.
    When I was young, she said, I liked walking the garden path at twilight
    and if the path was long enough I would see the moon rise.
    That was for me the great pleasure: not sex, not food, not worldly amusement.
    I preferred the moon’s rising, and sometimes I would hear,
    at the same moment, the sublime notes of the final ensemble
    of The Marriage of Figaro . Where did the music come from?
    I never knew.
    Because it is the nature of garden paths
    to be circular, each night, after my wanderings,
    I would find myself at my front door, staring at it,
    barely able to make out, in darkness, the glittering knob.
    It was, she said, a great discovery, albeit my real life.
    But certain nights, she said, the moon was barely visible through the clouds
    and the music never started. A night of pure discouragement.
    And still the next night I would begin again, and often all would be well.
    I could think of nothing to say. This story, so pointless as I write it out,
    was in fact interrupted at every stage with