The Best American Poetry 2012 (11 page)

Moaning Action at the Gas Pump

 . . . in the tragic world, all moaning tends to consider itself music.

Nicole Loraux

Soon it will be necessary to start a behavior of moaning outdoors when pumping gas . . . That capital
S
is a sort of gas nozzle. Pulling up, beginning a low moaning action, pulling a deep choral moan with cracks up through the body, the crude through the cracks of sea & earth, pulling neurotransmitters glutamate, acetylcholine, & others across chasms in the nervous system, into the larynx until the sound acts by itself.
Customer copy, look us in the eye.
So we shred the song to continue. Meaning morning moaning mourning. i am able to complete 34 moans by the time i've filled half the tank. City-states outlawed open wailing because it was not good for democracy, but you will merely be embarrassed even if you drive a hybrid. Please be embarrassed. Please.

Inside the pump, you can hear a bird, a screech-covered
Pelecanus occidentalis
lugged out of the Gulf with 4 million tons of the used booms in non-leakable plastic, 13 million tons of liquid in nonleakable plastic 5 miles up the road—their
5
has a leak in it by the way—the moan fans out as you put your head down on the hood of your car; please moan though the other drivers are staring. Squeak, there are other animals inside the pump, the great manatee—
Trichechus manatus
—you've seen it float like a rug that has something wrapped in it among grasses that will not return.
eeeoooiieeooooouuuuu,
this moan won't be the same mammal but is a democracy with no false knowledge, the sounds pushed to the edge of a painting, globs of oil floating to shores of salt-marshes. The broadcaster
says the globs “look like peanut butter,” wanting to sound lovable so we can begin to feel friendly about them. Ever since 3 wars ago the moan meeting other moans & you ask how to get over it . . . is it like Gilgamesh & Enkidu, David & Absolom, like Isis & Osiris, like Ishmael & history, is it like Hecuba & her kids, Cassandra who did not drive, is it like Mary, like Antigone who could barely lift the body to bury it, probably you don't you don't have to probably you don't have to get over it—

from
Gulf Coast

JANE HIRSHFIELD

In a Kitchen Where Mushrooms Were Washed

In a kitchen where mushrooms were washed,

the mushroom scent lingers.

As the sea must keep for a long time the scent of the whale.

As a person who's once loved completely,

a country once conquered,

does not release that stunned knowledge.

They must want to be found, those strange-shaped, rising morels,

clownish puffballs.

Lichens have served as a lamp wick.

Clean-burning coconuts, olives.

Dried salmon, sheep fat, a carcass of petrel set blazing:

light that is fume and abradement.

Unburnable mushrooms are other.

They darken the air they come into.

Theirs the scent of having been traveled, been taken.

from
Ploughshares

RICHARD HOWARD

A Proposed Curriculum Change

Dear Mrs Masters,

It's happened
again
!

  and the whole Fifth-Grade Class is upset

(which is why we're
writing
again: you told us

  to tell you when “
anything
related to

school” upsets the class,

      so now we're telling).

      You see, just last week,

thanks to Mr Lee's

  
connections
(that's what he calls the friends

who do him favors), our Fifth-Grade Science Class,

  all twelve, until the Klein twins got mumps,

—together, of course—

      and had to stay home,

      so we invited

Mike Rahn and Clark Taft,

  the two smartest kids in the Fourth-Grade,

to come instead, since Mr Lee had specified

  there would be twelve students visiting

the Sandusky Labs

      for our winter-term

      science field trip, and

no one wants to see

  two favors go to waste. Dinny—that's

Mr Lee: he
asked
us all to call him that,

  and now he's the one teacher at school

      
we're on first-name, or

      maybe nick-name terms

with . . . whom. Anyway,

  Dinny has this friend Mr Morton

who works in the Labs (he told us right away,

  “Call me Mort, everyone does”—first names

      must be a sort of

      code for Scientists),

on the development

  of cancerous tumors that he trained

to grow in mice (
induced
was the word he used).

  When he offered to show us how

      his experiment

      was coming along,

Lucy Wensley asked

  “Mr Mort” if he could tell one mouse

from the next: “Do you ever see something

  
individual
about a mouse—

      some particular

      mouse you're working on?”

(Lucy sometimes brings

  her pet guinea-pig to school with her,

so of course she'd ask a thing like that.)

  Her question really surprised Mort, but

      maybe what he said

      was a good answer;

after a moment

  he told this story: last week he had

to kill a mouse with a newborn litter, and

  to save her young, gave them to another

      mouse to bring them up

      with her own; and when

that experiment

  worked, he gave that foster-mother mouse

another
litter of newborn young, to see

  what she would do. At first all went well:

      the new babies were

      fat and already

growing fur, though still

  
blind—and then one night she ate them all! . . .

Not just Lucy but our whole Class, including

  the two Fourth-Graders, listened without

      saying anything.

      Nobody moved. Mort

opened the lab door,

  saying “Boys and girls, please come with me”

and the spell was broken. But Mrs Masters,

  no one has forgotten Mort's story.

      Over and over

      in Dinny's classes

we've learned this lesson:

  In the Animal World—and aren't we

animals too?—mothers and fathers go

  after their young, all shapes and sizes,

      pigs in model farms,

      Komodo dragons,

and now even mice!

  Maybe our own parents will eat
us

eventually—they may have eaten us

  already, and the rest of our life

      is just the process

      of their digestion.

That's not our life, it's

  our education, but it seems so . . .

one-sided! Maybe in Sixth-Grade, things will work

  the other way around, so that sons

      murder their fathers,

      babies eat grownups,

and Snow White poisons

  her wicked step-mother. So far that's

the best reason to leave Fifth-Grade behind us.

  Still, we don't see why Science—at least

      Dinny Lee's version—

      has to be so . . . so

animalistic.

  That may be how life is, but we'd like

to put in a word—two words—for Other Things

  we could learn at Park School, Duncan Chu

      
says that the right phrase

      for what we mean is

human interest:

  what we want to study at Park School

is how people have managed to
avoid

  behaving like animals, instead

      of becoming them.

      Is Science only

a history of death?

  Maybe we'll find out in Sixth-Grade that

no Fate is worse than death after all,

  and that life is going to be ours.

      Dear Mrs Masters,

      if these suggestions

make sense to you, please

  let us (and Dinny Lee) know about

what courses we'll be taking next year along

  the lines we have designated here,

      and the kind of books

      we should be reading

over the summer.

  (signed) Respectfully, the Fifth-Grade Class:

Judy Abrams, Nancy Akers, Jean Sturges, David Halperin,

  David Stashower, Jane McCullough,

      Arthur Englander,