The American Poetry Review July/August 2016

Losing Language 1. Men in their fifties find themselves wandering What it means to be displaced by another, to be ecstatic sometimes in everyday ways I wanted him as my companion There was no place in which he wanted to be, so traveling was a labor If I lived with him I would never leave She said I looked as if I had fallen in love It was true, but not the way she imagined 2. I was less sad about his death than moved by his life Displaced What it means to be ecstatic I asked him to tell me about the other side Which one, he said 3. Any life can be if it is lived In some brain injuries, the afflicted becomes less fluent, less able under…

Love Poem for the Proles My unpredictability cancels out my fidelity, which cancels out my trifling punk rock of a country heart which loves ruin more than Easter eggs and real eggs laid by real birds in real nests more than the female nakedness in the burnished black jacket trying to sell me something here on the HuffPo where I spend all day going from bad-news commotion to worse-news upshot like it’s my expertise to catalogue the twenty-first century’s decomposition as if I went to school for that and wrote a book on that when really I’m just lazy and domestic. Not yet a Granny in a rocker on a porch in West VA, but, you know, little half-pink roses on smocks and a fat philodendron in a white wire…

The Watch I threw a watch into Lake Michigan In honor of eternity I’d do anything To make her laugh on the jagged rocks It started to rain at Evanston Beach Her sadness was like a great cloud In a suburb north of the city We used to neck in her parents’ kitchen I remember the heat of our bodies Against the refrigerator One Sunday morning I went to church with her family And stood up when everyone else knelt down She believed the voice of the Lord God walked In the garden in the cool of the day But I heard thunderstorms I recall the lightning between us The night we broke up in a small red car In a parking lot near the beach We sobbed for hours…

AP2 Books Collected Poems: 1950–2012 by Adrienne Rich W. W. Norton 1216 pages, $60 hardcover, 2016 i. “without the other end”: An Introduction In the “Introduction” to her first volume of collected poems, Collected Early Poems: 1950–1970, published in 1993, Adrienne Rich looked back on the beginnings of her career as a poet: “I was like someone walking through a fogged-in city, compelled on an errand she cannot describe . . . holding one end of a powerful connector, useless without the other end.” The powerful connecter could be understood alternatively as poetry or as consciousness itself, and over the decades Rich would come to explore how profoundly both depended upon the situation of the body—a body among bodies—in history. The character-self in her 1993 “Introduction” can see how the…

Villagers boxes taped up and up then tied with twine | addressed on every side | in that careful longhand taught on other continents | they looked like mail bombs | going round and round the carousel | in a regional anxiety | stinking barrel of sheep’s cheese beaded in sweat | olive oil tin wrapped in much plastic | each printed letter a rounded separate bundle | standing on its own | the sore thumbs of my parents’ immigrant luggage at the United terminal | a friend who doesn’t speak at airports | except when spoken to | word for home that could also mean journey | or neverarrived | at the baggage claim | a person waits in a t-shirt printed with English words | whose arrangement is…

The Collection of the Canter Three days a week, into that stable of pre-adolescence I strode, where the smell of Absorbine and hoof dressing rose astringent from the cross ties, where a girl in muddy boots circled a curry comb, where the language of bridles and bits rolled in my mouth as I said d-ring snaffle and rubber pelham, Kimberwicke and hackamore. And I learned a horse must come to the bit, you cannot force him to collect himself, you must ask him with your weight and legs and hands. The girl walked her horse into his stall, unbuckled the halter, and hugged the V where the breastplate left a sweaty place she scrubbed away. We grazed them on braided nylon ropes or leather lead shanks. Tornado, the open jumper,…