Read The Best American Poetry 2012 Online
Authors: David Lehman
I listened for Dolphy's pipes in the pitch dark:
A far cry. Epistrophy. A refusal.
5.
A far cry. Epistrophy. A refusal.
A nightingale is recorded in a field
where finally we meet to touch and sleep.
A nightingale attests
as bombers buzz and whir
overhead enroute to raid.
We meet undercover of brush and dust.
We meet to revise what we heard.
The year I can't tell you. The past restages
the future. Palindrome we can't resolve.
But the coded trill a fever ascending,
a Markov chain, discrete equation,
generative pulse, sweet arrest,
bronchial junction, harmonic jam.
6.
Bronchial junction, harmonic jam,
her disco dancing shatters laser light.
Her rock rap screamed through a plastic bullhorn
could save my life. Now trauma is a remix,
a beat played back, a circadian pulse we can't shake,
inherent in the meter we might speak,
so with accompaniment I choose to heal
at a show where every body that I press against
lip syncs:
I've got post binary gender chores . . .
I've got to move. Oh, got to move.
This box
is least insufferable when I can feel
your anger crystallize a few inches away,
see revolutions in your hips and fists.
I need a crown to have this dance interlude.
7.
I need a crown to have this dance interlude
or more than one. Heating flapjacks you re-
read “Danse Russe,” where a man alone and naked
invents a ballet swinging his shirt around
his head. Today you're a dandier nude
in argyle socks and not lonely as you
slide down the hall echoing girly tunes
through a mop handle:
You make me feel like. . . .
She-bop doo wop . . .
an original butch
domestic. The landlord is looking through
the mini-blinds. Perched on a sycamore,
a yellow throated warbler measures your
schisms, fault lines, your taciturn vibrato.
Tonight, as one crowd, we will bridge this choir.
from
Beloit Poetry Journal
So Where Are We?
So where were we? The fiery
avalanche headed right at usâfalling,
flailing bodies in mid-airâ
the neighborhood under thick gray powderâ
on every screen. I don't know
where you are, I don't know what
I'm going to do, I heard a man say;
the man who had spoken was myself.
What year? Which Southwest Asian war?
Smoke from infants' brains
on fire from the phosphorus hours
after they're killed, killers
reveling in the horror. The more obscene
the better it works. The point
at which a hundred thousand massacred
is only a detail. Asset and credit bubbles
about to burst. Too much consciousness
of too much at once, a tangle of tenses
and parallel thoughts, a series of feelings
overlapping a sudden sensation
felt and known, those chains of small facts
repeated endlessly, in the depths
of silent time. So where are we?
My ear turns, like an animal's. I listen.
Like it or not, a digital you is out there.
Half of that city's buildings aren't there.
Who was there when something was, and a witness
to it? The rich boy general conducts the Pakistani
heroin trade on a satellite phone from his cave.
On the top floor of the Federal Reserve
in an office looking out onto Liberty
at the South Tower's onetime space,
the Secretary of the Treasury concedes
they got killed in terms of perceptions.
Ten blocks away is the Church of the Transfiguration,
in the back is a Byzantine Madonnaâ
there is a God, a God who fits the drama
in a very particular sense. What you saidâ
the memory of a memory of a remembered
memory, the color of a memory, violet and black.
The lunar eclipse on the winter solstice,
the moon a red and black and copper hue.
The streets, the harbor, the light, the sky.
The blue and cloudless intense and blue morning sky.
from
Granta
Tenor
To break with the past
Or break it with the past
The enormous car-packed
Parking lot flashes like a frozen body
Of water a paparazzi sea
After take off
And because the pigeons laid eggs and could fly
Because the kittens could survive
Under the rubble wrapped
In shirts of the dead
And the half-empty school benches
Where each boy sits next
To his absence and holds him
In the space between two palms
Pressed to a faceâ
This world this hospice
from
Beloit Poetry Journal
Death Is Something Entirely Else
Department of Trance
Department of Dream of Levitation
Department of White Fathom
Department of Winding
Sometimes my son orders me lie down
I like best when he orders me
lie down  close your eyes.
Department of Paper Laid Gently
(Department of Sound of Sheets of Paper
he covers me with)
then sings
I like best the smallest sounds he makes then
Department of This Won't Sting
Am I slipping away
Department of Violet Static
as if he were a distant station?
Department of Satellite
My child says
you sleep
Department of Infinitely Flexible Web
and covers my face with blankness
Department of Tap-Tapping the Vein
Department of Eyelash
I can't speak
      or even blink
or the page laid over my face will fall
Department of Clear Tape in Whorls and Double Helixes on the Wall
He says
mama don't look
Department of You Won't Feel a Thing
I cannot behold
Department of Pinprick
He will not behold
Department of Veils and Chimes
Lungs Afloat in Ether
I like this best
Department of Spider Vein
when I am most like dead
and being with him then, Department of Notes
Struck from Thin Glasses Successively at Random
I must explain to my child that sleep
is not the same as dead
Department of Borderlessness
so that he may not be afraid of
Department of Fingertips Lightly on Eyelids
so I can lie and listen
not holding not carrying not working
Department of Becalmed     faint sound of him
I am gone
His song is the door back to the room
I am composed of the notes
from
The Cincinnati Review