Innholdsfortegnelse for September - October 2015 i The American Poetry Review

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…

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…

Good Death Of words placed in their best black clothes. Of that darkness full. Of the laugh, forged of dust that spilled its gold light into the tomb. Of the wreath carved upon the copper vault. Of the ivory city—bones like trumpets—blowing you away from us in song. Of the city again where you will be welcomed by vultures. Of the road between the dates, a short slash. An usher in a gold hat. Of the pronunciation of sorrow, always, in summer. Of the snake who suffered the story. Of the afterlife & its downpour of ordinary rites. Of rites I enact in my broken thoughts. Of my fever waving its anguish until the match goes out in disbelief. Of the nine stars bleeding mercy beneath the roof of God.…

Cooled Metals Tourist of dusks In your parks Lightning’s lode Loses its way in the ground Nocturnal gold Dweller of nubile spaces of love The verdigris of spades will bloom The one who sets the circle free Robin Hood of inhuman currents After flint, gypsum The nebulous distant head Minute in its frozen mold This head isn’t worth The iron arm that tills its soil The stone that smashes it in The marsh that makes it sink The lake that drowns it The dynamite cartridge that blows it to bits This head isn’t worth The straw by which it’s consumed The crime that holds it in high regard The statue by which it’s defaced The delirium by which it’s exposed The uproar that calls it back The bridge that spans…

Chopin 1 Take the heart, there are some things it won’t say. It knows the math of sadness. Take the heart, it builds a wall because it loves you. The kind of wall Piranesi might make. Take the museum, you stand there holding someone’s hand. Everyone steals a glimpse because it is spring. Take the trolley, it is bringing earth and daffodils through the portal. The clouds are larger than the houses. Take scentless soap, the sheets smell like it. You fall toward the bed gulping each other. 2 How it all pours out like sound. Praise that. Car going over gravel on summer morning. Praise that. Two or three stones, and this happens mysteriously, are missing when it settles. There is only whistling. Praise that. Happy bird. Praise that.…

The Unthinkable —for Jess Smith, who prompted it The recruit worked on ciphers and broke the Soviets’ renowned “condor code” back in September 1962, before the big crisis, when “missives” meant “missiles,” and the way to win was to wink. A wink got you out of any jam those days when ballroom dancing was still in fashion and young women in ball gowns thought the unthinkable as they let clumsy cadets drag them across the floor. The plink of fate is something that science can’t abolish with its neutrons and angstroms and plancks and hadrons. That is one reason why I turned my back on the merchants of advanced micro devices, new chips, killer apps. When I think of the life I could have led on rush hour mornings, briefcase…

The High Heat I’m strict with my father, forcing him to square his shoulders, flex those creaky giraffe-knees, and choke up on the bat— all the mysteries I know only as commands, I teach as facts because he’s ignorant. I demonstrate the bleacher-swing when you whirl stunned at your weight. How I love this world as I toe my mound, finger my seam, ace it with a dab of Brylcreem, and choose among my whizzing thoughts: slider, floater, high heat: while he stares vacantly, fixed on the collapse of Poland instead of the bizarre junk ball that will plop at his feet raising a small pink cloud. He lunges, strike twelve. If I close my eyes he’s DiMaggio and I Koufax but under these dusty lindens he’s a young man…

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…

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…

RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS’ FOURTH poetry book, Lighting the Shadow (Four Way Books), probes human experience—from the tragic victims of violence and hatred to portraits of remarkable women, including Frida Kahlo’s artistry in the torturous grips of her near-fatal spinal injury. Griffiths reaches into “the sarcophagus of imagery,” into the body’s “oil of silence,” and into “America, / shining like a gun.” Poetry, family, and country sing out. Griffiths’ language has the intensity and edges of Toni Morrison’s Sula and Song of Solomon. Like Morrison, Griffiths invents new metaphors based on seen and felt histories. Lighting the Shadow invents a new vision of the poet’s self and America’s self— one that, despite “a venomous apple of mistakes,” insists on forging new truths. Griffiths’ third book, Mule & Pear (New Issues Poetry…

Permission First you learn that after a certain age you should no longer suck your thumb in public. Nor should you wear yard pants with no shirt or answer the phone “who is it?” Later, it becomes clear you should not beat soda machines or eat all the peppermint ice cream or make out on the carpet until your edges shriek with burning. Then comes a time you should not untie the top of your bathing suit while lying in the sun. The sun! A star that once lavished its lovelight upon you. The sun that stole your beauty one day and moved on, like a lover changing the locks while you’re at the grocery store. There is an age past which you must not flirt with anyone except babies.…

Here Comes the Hotstepper Unlike my older brother, I generally enjoyed the nineties. A world of Netscape, chat rooms and Fruit by the Foot. I remember them like the debossed covers of R.L. Stein. Neon sex toys dotting our suburban malls led us to believe in an intimacy communicated beyond brand names when our couch sucked back into a shady hole of hands. September came, laden with unused trapper keepers. Macarenas were danced. Ring Pops were had. Giga Pets and Beanie Babies, Dunk-A-roos and VHS cassettes. The Little Golden Books by my bed told me stories. Cedar Crest and chlorine. I remember snow days. Watching humanoid Bob Barker on split-screen TV. Closed armoires scented with piney Lemon Pledge. In the woods was mesh and abandoned buckets of porn beside inscrutable…

The gull pulls bags from trash and drags them clear. He’s big as a cat, a blur of snow and soot. He pokes until debris spills down the pier. He’s clumsy, and somehow he’s lost a foot. Chewed off? A winter fishing line? Wedged in boards? The stump’s a small sharp spear that stings the bird If ground is touched. He soars to foggy scree, Alights but flaps to halfway hang in air, spurred By pain to perform endless pirouettes. The bay’s warm surge troubles the cooler sea. The fishing fleet returns as silhouettes. These hours are small escapes, reprieves, rewards, Summer the center we try to pretend Will keep us strong, like love, and never end. ERNEST HILBERT’S newest collection, Caligulan, appears this fall. He lives in Philadelphia.…

Lately, I’ve been praying for life to surprise me like a pitch-black living room primed to fracture into song and streamers, a hand on my shoulder yelling, Didn’t think we remembered, did ya? Lately, my counter-thoughts have been riddled with guilt, the way a stray wallet excites before shaming, though shame lasts and bitters the tongue. I saw coverage yesterday of a third beheading while doing crunches on an exercise ball. The ball, I remember, was clown-nose red, and never before had I felt so damaged, so lucky and absurd. I drove home drowning in the hum of sports radio, grateful for the scores and in-depth analysis. Someone had become a restricted free-agent. Someone had been traded and was finally coming home. JARED HAREL’S poems have appeared in Tin House,…

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…

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…

Einstein’s Clock (1905) Something is ticking. Outside the window of the patent office the famous 15th Century clock is marking the passage of hours, of minutes & seconds, one after the other, as trains arrive at the Bern station disgorging passengers into orderly streets, one after the other, passengers with cases & parcels, one after the next, the way light, in Einstein’s understanding, moves in serial packets, quanta after quanta. The word photon is not in any dictionary. The term quantum mechanics does not appear in the scientific record. In Paris, the Curies are working to isolate pure radium, for which Marie will receive her second Nobel Prize in 1911; the luminous new metal will be prized for use on watch dials & as a healthy additive to raisin bread…

Flowering Olives It is futile to pretend I am looking at something else. In fact, I am doing my best to gaze as deeply as I can into the crevice of a single olive blossom. There must be hundreds of thousands of these tiny flowers, falling all over themselves among the silver leaves of a single small tree. Too many for one tree to bear, they gather in heaps beneath the twisted branches, clusters so thick on the top of the low stone wall, all the breeze can do is blow them back and forth across each other, the way a larger wind can do no more with sand than allow it to build and dissolve and rebuild itself into dunes. I have a single olive flower in my palm.…

Transfiguration I am obliged to believe that it’s true— this mystical fog over the ocean, and the endless shore waves, and me—as if from Atlantis! Far out there, a few people are taking a sunbath on the shore of another sea to which I was once related through blood and love’s seed. Here the sand is brutal, and a strange cold turns my age blue. My skin is streaked red and white: I am a striped flag—occidental. The Last Flag I’m ashamed of my widowhood because everybody treats me so nicely and I don’t reward them as they deserve. I’m ashamed of my absolute loneliness, and my last flag floats over the last rampart like a rhyme, although I want to die in free verse. The Sun’s Missing Shadow This…

SO FAR THE NEW POETRY OF THE LAST YEAR THAT I HAVE READ has been a smorgasbord of social commentary, hard love, and varieties of contemplative humanism. If you were a realtor showing new books of poems as houses, you’d be trying to sell your buyers husky bungalows situated in tidy but aging neighborhoods of deeply felt lives, neodelinquent alcazars dandy’d up with facades shaped like puzzles, or rakish saltboxes that open their rope-and-pulley windows to the sounds of the quick-witted, the slick, the worldly-wise, the Brooklynesque. Christopher Gilbert. Turning into Dwelling. Graywolf Press. I can think of few things in the literary world that are as honorable as poets and editors doing the Lord’s work of getting into print the unpublished manuscript of a late poet. It’s enough just…