The Best American Poetry 2012 (24 page)

It had been a long day at the office and a long ride back to the small apartment where I lived. When I got there I flicked on the light and saw on the table an envelope with my name on it. Where was the clock? Where was the calendar? The handwriting was my father's, but he had been dead for forty years. As one might, I began to think that maybe, just maybe, he was alive, living a secret life somewhere nearby. How else to explain the envelope? To steady myself, I sat down, opened it, and pulled out the letter. “Dear Son,” was the way it began. “Dear Son” and then nothing.

from
Poetry

LARISSA SZPORLUK

Sunflower

Wind takes your hair

like a hooligan owl

and leaves a deep pocket

of dusk in your scalp.

Love without pride

is a love with no end.

You keep calling me in

to fill up your head,

but the mutinous dust

of the dead yellow field

says better not listen

to a thing with a stem.

from
Ploughshares

DANIEL TOBIN

The Turnpike

 . . . an expansion,

Like gold to airy thinness beat . . .

You away, and me on the Peter Pan

    heading home from my own required remove,

I'm drawn by the window's broad reflection,

    the traffic passing along it like a nerve—

an endless charge of cars inside the pane:

    the voltage of the real; though as they go

sliding down its long, ethereal sheen

    where the solid world softens into flow

they take on the ghostly substance of a dream

    or, rather, what we picture dreams to be

since when we're in them they are what we seem,

    and cause us joy or pain as vividly

as the lives we think we live between the lines

    that imprint us and we pass between.

Here, the world inverts. Shades materialize

    and cars speeding left expand a breach

that transports into doubles on the right,

    and those in transit opposite condense

their mirror selves in a second teeming flight

    as if our lightship bus could break such bonds

and matter shatter. Like all things physical

    it's a conjure of parts and energies,

a Never Land of haunts inside the skull,

    though saying so won't prevent this child's cries

from jolting with their needful disturbance,

    or the aging woman across the aisle

from leaning in her slackened, palpable face—

    comically, mildly—till the infant calms.

If as scientists say we are like hurled stones,

    as bounded and bound, dear, by material,

and that our minds resolve into a mist

    we thinly feel to be the actual,

then who's to say the rock is not the air

    it hurtles through, observed from deeper in,

not above. So you and I circuit there,

    firing the inexhaustible engine.

from
Southwest Review

NATASHA TRETHEWEY

Dr. Samuel Adolphus Cartwright on Dissecting the White Negro, 1851

To strip from the flesh

the specious skin; to weigh

    in the brainpan

seeds of white

pepper; to find in the body

its own diminishment—

    blood-deep

and definite; to measure the heft

of lack; to make of the work of faith

the work of science, evidence

    the word of God: Canaan

be the
servant of servants
; thus

to know the truth

    of this: (this derelict

corpus, a dark compendium, this

atavistic assemblage—flatter

feet, bowed legs, a shorter neck) so

deep the tincture

    —
see it!
—

we still know white from not.

from
New England Review

SUSAN WHEELER

From “The Split”

'Bye, kid in first grade on your paddle cart.

'Bye, Lorraine, Outward Bound in the snow.

'Bye, motorcycle David.

'Bye, you bright spirits, born of my friends. Jimmy. Natalie.

'Bye, beautiful one, your father said your pink skin would be tender, I was afraid for you.

'Bye, one's devoted mother, another's devoted son.

'Bye to Playboy Club Bill, to the Roxy Bill, to the Bill going aft with the cross.

'Bye, dickering friend to Sonja, I wanted to show you up.

'Bye Dad, 'bye Mom.

'Bye, Duncan's dancing bear shining, shining.

'Bye, great dogs I have known. Cats. Raccoon I hit.

'Bye to Bob Liberty, you must be gone.

'Bye to the beggar no more on his corner.

'Bye, Ben, sparklers and flowers, the lamp of the music.

'Bye, Barbara Latham, Abinata, Ray Yoshida. 'Bye, Gelsy.

'Bye, Meldrum and Carrel, Gladys, Olive C. 'Bye, May and Winslow. My lovely first cousin.

'Bye to the husband who was the best wife.

'Bye to those I fear dead.

I know you all in his absence tonight.

I know you all in his absence tonight.

from
The New Yorker

FRANZ WRIGHT