The Best American Poetry 2012 (7 page)

This time I forgive you but I shall not forgive you again.

I observe that he forgives you but he will not forgive you again.

Although I eat this fish I don't know its name.

Spirits watch over the soul of course.

I suppose and I presume.

I pose and I resume.

I suppose I have a horse.

How in the world can you afford this house I said and she said

I had a good divorce.

Strangers are warned that here there is a fierce, fast dog.

Whores have no business getting lost in the fog.

Is it to your ears or your soul that my voice is intolerable?

Whether Florinda lays a hand on his knee or his voluble, he pleads a headache

and the narrator concludes,
The problem is insoluble.

from
The Nation

JENNIFER CHANG

Dorothy Wordsworth

The daffodils can go fuck themselves.

I'm tired of their crowds, yellow rantings

about the spastic sun that shines and shines

and shines. How are they any different

from me? I, too, have a big messy head

on a fragile stalk. I spin with the wind.

I flower and don't apologize. There's nothing

funny about good weather. Oh, spring again,

the critics nod. They know the old joy,

that wakeful quotidian, the dark plot

of future growing things, each one

labeled
Narcissus nobilis
or
Jennifer Chang.

If I died falling from a helicopter, then

this would be an important poem. Then

the ex-boyfriends would swim to shore

declaiming their knowledge of my bulbous

youth. O, Flower, one said, why aren't you

meat? But I won't be another bashful shank.

The tulips have their nervous joie-de-vivre,

the lilacs their taunt. Fractious petals, stop

interrupting my poem with boring beauty.

All the boys are in the field gnawing raw

bones of ambition and calling it ardor. Who

the hell are they? This is a poem about war.

from
The Nation

JOSEPH CHAPMAN

Sparrow

St. John of the Cross

On the oil spot,

in the Municipal Parking Garage, I am a garden

closed up

  & a fountain sealed. In the folds of my habit;

in the wings of my rib cage;

I hold nothingness like a black jewel.

Fountain of Self, Fountain of the Interior.

I strip to my skin. Dark clouds illuminate me.

Moths fly around;

I am puzzled by the light.

Withdraw your eyes. These steel cables are flesh.

This elevator's silver car is holy.

And the floor numbers—strung up like lanterns

on the boat of the dead.

I'm half-life. I'm already words

& the Sparrow.

  Listen for me in your throat when I'm gone.

  from
The Cincinnati Review

HEATHER CHRISTLE

BASIC

This program is designed to move a white line

from one side of the screen to the other.

This program is not too hard, but it has

a sad ending and that makes people cry.

This program is designed to make people cry

and step away when they are finished.

In one variation the line moves diagonally

up and in another diagonally down.

This makes people cry differently,

diagonally. A whole room of people

crying in response to this program's

variations results in beautiful music.

This program is designed to make such

beautiful music that it feels like at last

they have allowed you to take the good canoe

into the lake of your own choosing

and above you the sky exposes one

or two real eagles, the water

warm or marked with stones,

however you like it, blue.

from
The New Yorker

HENRI COLE

Broom

A starkly lighted room with a tangy iron odor;

a subterranean dankness; a metal showerhead hanging from the ceiling;

a scalpel, a trocar, a pump; a white marble table; a naked, wrinkled

body faceup on a sheet, with scrubbed skin, clean nails,

and shampooed hair; its mouth sewn shut, with posed lips,

its limbs massaged, its arteries drained, its stomach and intestines emptied;

a pale blue sweater, artificial pearls, lipstick, and rouge;

hands that once opened, closed, rolled, unrolled, rerolled, folded, unfolded,

turned, and returned, as if breathing silver, unselfing themselves now

(very painful); hands that once tore open, rended, ripped,

served, sewed, and stroked (very loving), pushing and butting now

with all their strength as their physiognomy fills with firming fluid;

hands once raucous, sublime, quotidian—now strange, cruel, neat;

hands that once chased me gruesomely with a broom, then brushed my hair.

from
The Threepenny Review

BILLY COLLINS

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