The Best American Poetry 2013 (22 page)

and refuses to sing for me. You no longer bring me news of a timeshare abroad

which I might consider. You draw up from your long, black stomach papers

I will not sign. O, lamplight.

You are equally no friend. Beside you I deliver a monologue

correcting previous scholars about the usefulness of tulips. O, useless tulip.

There is so much I want to say to you when grinning, you mock me

for watching you from the window. I feel ashamed

for wanting you. For sitting quietly in a chair especially

to miss her. O, musty library flooded with sun. To rub her name

from the faces of your books.

from
MAKE
and
Verse Daily

I am no longer ashamed

how for weeks, after, I wanted

to be dead—not to die,

mind you, or do

myself in—but to be there

already, walking amongst

all those I'd lost, to join

the throng singing,

if that's what there is—

or the nothing, the gnawing—

So be it. I wished

to be warm—& worn—

like the quilt my grandmother

must have made, one side

a patchwork of color—

blues, green like the underside

of a leaf—the other

an old pattern of the dolls

of the world, never cut out

but sewn whole—if the world

were Scotsmen & sailors

in traditional uniforms.

Mourning, I've learned, is just

a moment, many,

grief the long betrothal

beyond. Grief what

we wed, ringing us—

heirloom brought

from my father's hot house

—the quilt heavy tonight

at the foot of my marriage bed,

its weight months of needling

& thread. Each straightish,

pale, uneven stitch

like the white hairs I earned

all that hollowed year—pull one

& ten more will come,

wearing white, to its funeral—

each a mourner, a winter,

gathering ash at my temple.

from
The American Scholar

only a few people

really try to understand

relativity like my father

who for decades kept

the same gray book

next to his bed

with diagrams

of arrows connecting

clocks and towers

in the morning

he'd cook eggs

and holding

a small red saucepan

tell us his tired children

a radio on a train

passing at light speed

could theoretically

play tomorrow's songs

now he is gone

yes it's confusing

I have placed

my plastic plant

in front of the window

its eternal leaves

sip false peace

my worldly nature

comforts me

I wish we had

a radio sunlight

powers so without

wasting precious

electrons we could listen

to news concerning

Africa's southern coast

where people are trying

with giant colored

sails to harness

the cool summer wind

with its special name

I always forget

last night I read a book

which said he was born

an old determinist

and clearly it was all

beautiful guesses

and I watched you knowing

where you travel

when you sleep

I will never know

from
The Believer

K
IM
A
DDONIZIO
was born in Washington, DC, and now lives in Oakland, California, where she teaches private poetry workshops in her home and online. She is the author, most recently, of
Lucifer at the Starlite
and
Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within
, both from W. W. Norton. Her verse novel,
Jimmy & Rita
, was recently reissued by Stephen F. Austin State University Press. Addonizio's work has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, and other honors. She has two novels from Simon & Schuster and is currently at work on a second collection of stories and a play. She is a member of the Nonstop Beautiful Ladies, a word/music project. She plays blues harmonica and is learning the banjo. Visit her online at
www.kimaddonizio.com
.

Of “Divine,” Addonizio writes: “My brother once commented, ‘Now I get how writers work. You're magpies.' Which we both understood to mean: Writers scavenge from wherever they can. In the case of ‘Divine,' I scavenged from Dante, Plato, the Bible, fairy tales, old vampire movies, whoever said ‘Only trouble is interesting' is the first rule of fiction, early Christian flagellants, a trip to Australia where I saw bats in a botanical garden, and my then-present emotional state. Which was, essentially: There's no place like hell for the holidays. When I googled ‘magpies' for this statement, I discovered they possess a few more writerly traits: They are clever and often despised, little poètes maudits. The Chinese considered them messengers of joy, but the Scots thought they carried a drop of Satan's blood under their tongues. They are fond of bright objects. And then this: When confronted with their image in a mirror, they recognize themselves.”

S
HERMAN
A
LEXIE
was born in 1966 and grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. His first collection of stories,
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
(1993), won a PEN/Hemingway Award. In collaboration
with Chris Eyre, a Cheyenne/Arapaho Indian filmmaker, Alexie adapted a story from that book, “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” into the screenplay for the movie
Smoke Signals
. His most recent books are the poetry collection
Face
, from Hanging Loose Press, and
War Dances
, stories and poems from Grove Press.
Blasphemy
, a collection of new and selected stories, appeared in 2012 from Grove Press. He is lucky enough to be a full-time writer and lives with his family in Seattle.

Of “Pachyderm,” Alexie writes: “Lying in a university town hotel, unable to sleep, I watched a National Geographic documentary about elephants. There was a scene of a mother elephant coming upon a dead elephant's bones. The mother elephant carefully touched the bones with her trunk. She seemed to be mourning the loss of another elephant. It was devastating. Then, a few days later, I watched a CNN story about an Iraq War veteran who'd lost both of his legs to an improvised explosive device. He was confident in his ability to rehab successfully, but I also detected an undercurrent of anger. So, while I was working on a novel the mourning elephant and wounded soldier merged in my mind. And that's where ‘Pachyderm' had its origins.”

N
ATHAN
A
NDERSON
was born in Spokane, Washington, in 1973. He is an assistant professor at Marietta College in Marietta, Ohio, where he teaches composition, literature, and creative writing. His poems have appeared in
Iron Horse Literary Review
,
Sewanee Theological Review
, and
New Ohio Review
.

Of “Stupid Sandwich,” Anderson writes: “This poem started when a few lines (a shadowy echo of what would become the speaker's voice) surfaced while I was working on another project. As the speaker's voice developed and the context began to take shape, I became interested in how this particular speaker responds and, more broadly, how all of us respond, when the daily pressures of a life become seemingly unmanageable.”

N
IN
A
NDREWS
was born in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1958. She is the editor of a book of translations of the French poet Henri Michaux,
Someone Wants to Steal My Name
(Cleveland State University Press). She is also the author of several books, including
The Book of Orgasms
,
Spontaneous Breasts
,
Why They Grow Wings
,
Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane
,
Sleeping with Houdini
,
The Secret Life of Mannequins
, and
Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum?
Her newest full-length collection,
Southern Comfort
, was published by CavanKerry Press in 2009.

Of “The Art of Drinking Tea,” Andrews writes: “I have long been fascinated and entertained by the idea of enlightenment. I think my first exposure to the concept was Ram Dass's purple book,
Be Here Now,
which I bought for the symbolic price of $3.33 back in 1971. My brother liked to read it aloud and laugh hysterically. For months he would shout out to me:
Nin! Be here now!

“
If only I could not be here
, I would think.

“A few years later I attended Zen meditation classes in the frigid upstairs of a frat house.
All we do is breathe here
, the bearded college professor would say.
No thoughts, just breaths.
I would sit on the hard wooden floor and stare at a white wall, thinking,
This is the dumbest thing I have ever done.
But I loved it all the same.

“I especially loved it when the meditation instructor would talk about Zen koans and mix them up with quotes from philosophers such as Heidegger's
Being is what determines beings as beings
. Or Hegel's
Pure being and pure nothing are, therefore, the same.
Or Thich Nhat Hanh,
Your being is like the tangerine
.

“I loved then as I love now the combination of the mystical and the absurd.

“One night the Zen teacher lectured on the Japanese tea ceremony. He explained that the simple act of drinking tea can be transformative. While I remember nothing about the details of the tea ceremony, I remember everything about an attractive, long-haired man who was seated beside me. As the teacher discussed the drinking of tea, I fantasized about the long-haired man.

“In my notes from that night I wrote:
You might be only a sip or kiss away from nirvana.

“It is that memory which inspired me to write ‘The Art of Drinking Tea.' ”

J
OHN
A
SHBERY
was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. He earned degrees from Harvard and Columbia, went to France as a Fulbright Scholar in 1955, and lived there for much of the next decade. His many collections of poetry include
Quick Question
(2012),
Planisphere
(2009), and
Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems
(2007), which was awarded the 2008 International Griffin Poetry Prize.
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
(1975) won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award;
Some Trees
(1956) was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. The Library of America published the first volume of his collected poems in 2008. He has translated a number of French authors,
including Arthur Rimbaud, Raymond Roussel, Pierre Reverdy, and Pierre Martory. Ashbery has served as executive editor of
Art News
and as art critic for
New York
magazine and
Newsweek
; he exhibits his collages at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery (New York). He taught for many years at Brooklyn College (CUNY) and Bard College, and in 1989–1990 delivered the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (receiving its Gold Medal for Poetry in 1997) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1988 to 1999. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships and was a MacArthur Fellow from 1985 to 1990; most recently, he received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation (2011) and a National Humanities Medal presented by President Obama at the White House (2012). His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages. He was the guest editor of the inaugural volume in
The Best American Poetry
series. He lives in New York. Additional information is available in the “About John Ashbery” section of the Ashbery Resource Center's website, a project of the Flow Chart Foundation,
www.flowchartfoundation.org/arc
.