The American Poetry Review September - October 2015

1 All I wanted was the communal table, yet here lies a stone slab empty with me, though here I am. I saw some soul set my meal with dream, then leave a gift for me: a ten-toothed comb to rake what’s dead from me until the comb’s carved medieval scene where bend two horses water-consoled adds to me the hope of that number. My own comb’s a lime-shined prairie with the grass of plastic acres. My carver never was? or must have roamed. So I do love the steady hand that carved this other comb: the fence of the kingdom if turned tooth-side down upon my brightened stone. The kingdom does come. For me, this is how. 2 Upon my bright stone how strange is the comb’s kingdom. Though…

Into the Alpine Meadow I Send a Few Silent Apologies She said last night she couldn’t sleep in the bed clearly designed by someone who wanted to punish future mothers for daring to lug anyone into this terrible world. And also the junior high school cheerleaders staying at the hotel were so truly happy it made her feel the power of her inner murderous dowager. Now it was quiet though still we felt their martial cries echo with ominous joyful sentience off the sides of the mountains, melting the last patches of early summer snow. We were eating dinner outside in that evening light that makes everything familiar. In her hair Heather wore a few little rose-colored flowers as if to remind us she bears with what we all agree…

MATTHEW ZAPRUDER IS ENGAGED IN an aesthetic enterprise atypical in the beginning of the 21st century: a poetic study of slowness, and the orchestration of awareness which becomes available in the deceleration of time. In Zapruder’s poems a kind of close, contemplative attention is trained upon the momentto-moment environments of self; the small gets big, the minor becomes major. His usually simple narratives inflect the small data of dailiness with sensibility. The result is a lucid, dreamlike poetry, one that moves with the pace of a dust mote drifting in living room sunlight. It sounds simple, yet the poems are layered with small, surprising precisions, intimacies and sensitivities. With Sun Bear, along with the two books that precede it, Zapruder is making a remarkably unpretentious, but very distinctive body of…

Taking Off the Front of the House I’m at the kitchen table, drinking strong tea, eating eggs with poppy-gold yolks from our chickens, Marilyn and Estelle. There’s a red car parked across the street and my neighbor’s gorgeous irises, their frilled tongues tasting the air. “Monsanto is suing Vermont,” I say, turning the pages of The Times. I say it loud because Janet’s in the living room in the faded chair the cat has scratched into hay eating yogurt and the strawberries she brought home from the field where she labors to relieve the tender berry of its heavy chemical load. “What?” she says. She isn’t wearing her hearing aids so I take a breath and project my voice. And as I enunciate the corporate evils, suddenly the front of…

The Forthcoming Disasters of Gold River In a picture in a museum, the dry grasses will start a fire that eats the frame away. The windows will take over depth of feeling while the townspeople take over transparency. The idiot boy won’t be in the field nearby to save the day. The doctor won’t know what he has given his favorite patient. The train headed their way with supplies will shrink and be placed under glass. The returning soldier will get off the train to chip away at the glass and create a fine snow. When he finally arrives, the snow will rise from his lungs and cut tiny holes in his beloved’s face as he speaks. The girl with whom we most identify must stand at the window and…

Immortality Scribbling in the margins of lament, in the dead sea canto, sure Lotze is in his muddy rowboat stringing the blonde mandolin—the companion snail lecturing him about color wheels of sizzling garlic and the universal flat heat death, not of oblivion. Oblivion being, almost always, a cyclical neurotic fixation down here in the reeds with the greenish pike and winter eglantine: ache thung chien kang me! Lotze now thinking about the commerce of crocodile mothers in a poorly lit underworld, some dry egyptian bread, or possibly just papers sprawling before composition. He sings, “Usura, Usura.” And then, uncle, the penalty that is not death but silence. And the gossiping middle-aged nurses with large breasts emptying the pewter bedpan before vespers. Delmore Schwartz Vigilant Among Large Headed Lilacs It is…