Innholdsfortegnelse for November - December 2015 i The American Poetry Review

I Had a Mane Once A glorious thicket. A generosity for all the cicadas to visit when the rains descended. I let the hornets make a mockery of me. I didn’t sweat it. I let them sting and sting. I was enormous and magnanimous I cut my leg and let the maggots build an Empire. What did I care? There’s enough meat in me to go around. Then I’d stretch so the grubs could find new avenues. And they’d shiver with gratitude. They’d pass out drunk along the edges of the wound. I was my own economy. You could see me coming from miles around. And yes, I could break your last best thing in half. And yes, I was every inch an animal. But most days I was merciful:…

ONE DAY LAST SPRING, SHORTLY AFTER my rueful, fiercely funny 91-year-old father had entered the hospital for what, with characteristic irony, he was calling “the last hurrah,” I thought of something he’d once said to me. In the summer of 1968, when I was fourteen, my mother decided that I needed to take my head out of the stack of books I’d been reading, and asked my father to take me on at work. My father, like a lot of firefighters then and now, had a trade on the side. A painting contractor in suburban housing developments, he was, to put it mildly, a meticulous craftsman (bordering on the obsessive-compulsive in his attention to detail and neatness). I was not. From 2nd grade on, the Sisters of Mercy at my…

The future wants to vote now, not wait to happen. We never get the world ready for its arrival. I know, know know know because I’m fuII of future, tons of it, eons and minutes as eternities spin threads— first rays and last rays of light stuck on time unable to move, held by light with no way to keep still. Stay with me, time. I can’t give the future all it wants today, wait. I have one lamp and one journey. It’s a million trips with turns. We endure, fall and find gravity to greet. I slide into another time. Did you vote? No time, no time yet. We need all our future to get it done, to finish, to even start to win the election, to lose the…

PAUL MAGEE What would you describe as your key points of connection to the world? C.D. WRIGHT From the ground up. Have always thought of myself as a kind of autochthon. A poet told me once that if you take root, you will grow. Though I have moved coast to coast in my life, I was very rooted before I started changing addresses, and in particular before moving from rural areas to urban areas. I have a lot of regard for the intelligence of the city, but I never felt that I needed to be divorced from one, in order to be attached to another. However briefly I find myself in a strange place, I am intent on locating myself; where I came from at this point is portable; I…

Books The Heights of Macchu Picchu, by Pablo Neruda (trans. Tomás Q. Morín), Copper Canyon Press, 2014 ACROSS THE STREET FROM MY APARTMENT, AT A 24-hour laundromat where pimps set up shop in the small hours and prostitutes scatter when the cops cruise by, you can find a tack board with advertisements for a variety of local services: carpet cleaning, dog walking, and guided trips to “Macchu Picchu,1 the Jewel of the Andes.” Macchu Picchu: it’s only a phone call (and a credit card) away. But, a little more than a century ago, you wouldn’t have known this archaeological wonder, royal estate of Incan rulers, existed. In 1911, Melchor Arteaga, a Peruvian farmer and innkeeper who lived near Macchu Picchu, was approached by Hiram Bingham III, a lecturer at Yale,…

Little House A Priori Lip sync the networked tears satisfied that effect is the cause beyond all axioms or anything uterine There is no gestational place like home because there is no place At least no place without spritely Kant in gingham ready to skip through it I fear you misunderstand because there is no you nor any other locus of identity but without a name for what the paths are through how can we get the dosage right or know what to tip? I want to land which is the one thing denied us just as us is denied our little false collective A dropdown menu of breakables falls but not into place like how I still haven’t heard of Kurt Cobain or any other form of light for…

Staggering Skywards A road without beginning, Branches of dirt, plumes of mist A temple squats pink against the sky A priest in a T shirt rubs his eyes Anoints the car, then my forehead— I have a mark from the goddess of the mountains It will not wash off easily. A sedan speeds by, in the window a sign DANGER, then scrawled under it BEAUTY NOT MAKE LOVE. I think I understand this Imperfectly. A man with a herd of young cows comes close The cows are reddish colored, burnished. By the herd, a dressing table Tossed over the rock’s edge Flimsy wood and metal, Daubed with paint. I am entering my own life. What is inside, what is outside None of that is clear any more. I teeter at…

Joseph’s Work In the great scheme of things, my job— Overseeing the produce at Sunshine Market, Maintaining quality in the bins—can’t be listed Among the jobs of first importance, I realize, but it does require some talent, The same displayed on a larger scale By the Joseph my parents were thinking of In naming me, the favorite son of Jacob, Who ended up as the overseer Of all the Egyptian granaries. It’s true my work doesn’t use all my gifts, But neither did Joseph’s work use all of his. His gift for interpreting dreams, for instance, Though it won him his place, wasn’t required Any time afterwards. If he used it then, He used it at home, on weekends, the place and time I use for playing my trumpet or…

My Inwardness The breakdown got up, wearing a short skirt, and full of gray matter that oozed out of her pores. She was about to impregnate my universe, taking her infant strolling in a horse-drawn buggy through the agitated crowd that had gathered in my brain. I don’t know, I’m on a barstool trying to work out something about narration: two men are talking. The world as an urn for dreams. I have a car, two dogs, a job, a television, and dreams. A watercolor of an orchid devouring a small child invades a rich man’s dream. If love is a fruit, it is a fruit with wings, an apple, the skin of an apple wrapped around a delicate tart. A fine, crinkly dress that falls off the shoulders of…

LANGUAGE IS INHERENTLY UNDER PRESSure, even this sentence. There’s the restriction of time, the constrictions of page space. There are the limits of understanding. “The thing itself always escapes,” Derrida wrote. And yet, an utterance’s ultimate inability to fully represent the mysterious source material of its existence can reveal other layers of meanings, which ripple outward from a speech act in ways the speaker doesn’t always control. I’m just beginning to describe a quality within poetry I’m going to call decomposition, something we as poets can not only identify, but cultivate. For what is a poem other than a tantalizing glimpse at meaning dissolving, a ceremonialized “experience of almost” slipping through our hands? “A word is elegy to what it signifies,” wrote Robert Hass in his most famous poem, “Meditation…

56,000-Year Poem This morning I’m part me, part anything. In my notebook I uselessly draw a leaf, a rat that loves a cat, Fatima’s hand. After anywhere, any place, secondhand, I set down words on blue lines, like pigeons flying through the open doors of the British Museum, or crows on a fence. I remember . . . a Renaissance painting, three astrologers, I believe the Magi, at rest in the desert their faces look inward, sextant, hour glass, charts beside them— the intelligence of clouds in the morning sky. They cross the painted desert without words. Beyond the reach of their prayers, they find a child stabled with his mother, linger . . . witness the circumcision, then journey homeward in the dead of winter. I gnaw a bone…

My Noir In nineteen forty-nine we still have inkwells with ink bottles in carved-on hardwood desks that are bolted to the floor, with cast-iron scroll grillwork for legs, the whole assembly wholly elegant in an antique way. Somebody loves somebody whose capital initials are dug in wide and deep, and more than one obscenity is sanded out but clear, plus spilled ink stains that some days look like maps— I’ve written on and written at these desks, learned to draw each letter like a drawing, and learned to spell my name wrong with an e—not Stanley but Plumly—learned the hidden art of paying no attention in favor of the windows in the spring that open on the fat oaks just outside and are locked against the winter and catch-your-deathof- cold—how…

Learning to Write the Alphabet My parents were in the cabin. They were gone. They came again. They were gaudy. The shiny spokes were from the window. In a dream I ate beads from a dress made of buckskin. The beads were fish. They were berries. They had lights in them. I licked the light. It was stars I mouthed in their glittering. Their lone movement across the black sky. Here a light bulb. Here a hand saying, eat. The beads from a string. I picked them from the loose thread. Little berries and shiny fish. The voices were loud again. Then they were gone. It was light. It was dark. It was light again. Would you like to live in the house with us? Call us mother and father.…

As a foreigner my identity was against it by default But later as a mother I was to make sandwiches I turned away from my American child to hide a grimace as the knife slid on the oily surface extracting a hanging grub the mustard of dusty, old midcentury velvet couches I nagged my husband for separate utensils fear of contamination Then, one day I was stranded starving under a sleeping child The sandwich still under his chubby fingers bitten only once about to fall I moved the free arm closed my eyes as survivors on TV brought it to my lips and bit it Sweet swirls swimming in fat Thick, creamy Fat fromage de meaux Unpasteurized Beautiful body of butter The jelly sandwiches of the past were the ones…

Eden One day, the boy who lived next door began to eat the flowers in his mother’s garden. He started with the herbs she grew along the borders: pungent sage and fragrant thyme, medicinal oregano. Before too long, sensing he was onto something, he turned to tasting roses, irises, and then, as if he doubted he would find true love, the petals of the daisies, one by one. By August it got dangerous: he ate a foxglove plant, which made his heart skip beats. They rushed him to the hospital while we prayed hungrily for God’s forgiveness, not recognizing what he really craved was to be noticed, and not be cast out of our delicious earthly paradise. The Love Boat My niece and I assemble it; it takes all afternoon,…

Rogue I do not wish to be this elephant plagued with cemeteries and a mind that holds and holds, watertight, the layers of losses— and nuzzles the earth to turn up what it turns and sweeps at the earth with the grace of noses; I do not relish this thickness, these feet slung at the ankle with a leathery drape which dust up and pack down in cyclical fever the narrowing plots of survivable brush. I do not wish to be an un-tusked mother who whines, who thins in the corners of her sons’ eyes— not noting the tweak in each, the rivulet of current striking out, mutating, mutant— not predicting that made hysterical by loss an elephant goes rogue, rams a grey grief; lumbers its heady mass into the…

Tree of Obscurity A Fagus sylvatica on Waterway has formed a burl to seal off a wound. Like someone with a scar on their lip, like Joaquin, the actor, it’s part of the appeal. I pass the tree often, at the end of a head-jammed-up-in-a-shitstorm but sluggish run and hunker under the canopy to breathe. Compelled in any case to check on this tree since the property is untended. I looked up the cost of an Air Spade™, probably not what it needs (supersonic air to break up compaction). I know enough to see, needs are not being met, that were they met, it would mean human intervention. A compulsion, nothing on the level of my sisterin- law scrambling over a security fence in her bespoke heels to feed feral…

Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear and what isn’t closer than you thought? Start with bills, so sweet over the transom with the polite origami of their envelopes, as if inviting you out of the house, out of doors, away from your infernal typing: come, visit! Until they come again. And again, closer and closer, like texts from an ex-husband that you have cleverly given his own ring-tone—the science fiction one, so that every time he wants something he breaks into your village home like a flying saucer landing on earth, so close, all of a sudden, the peace and quiet you have built shattered, and there he is, ray-gun brandished, demanding what time, how much, why not, why don’t you ever, if you would only, I need…

Written April 27, 2015 in the Blank Pages at the Back of Bolaño’s A Little Lumpen Novelita And with Baltimore going up, on a Monday, if I asked will it fly high like a bird up in the sky and you heard Billy Preston’s voice as much as any sparrow in your eye it’d be because simile is simply cinema, the screen upon which we watch the language we use projected, a screen we stand behind and from around the back of which we can never find our way in front, I mean without each other, I mean, as individuals, like owners of property, like amputators of senses, like those who think they’re protected by the forces that assault others, I mean, each other, by which I mean not each…