The Best American Poetry 2012 by David Lehman

stopped
    speaking with, a chest out of which music
    will come if she’s a drum flattened tight, if she’s
    pulled like canvas across a field, a frame
    where curves don’t show, exhalation without air.
    Then this off-pitch soprano steals through.
    2.
    Then this off-pitch soprano steals through
    a crack that’s lit. A scarlet gap between
    loose teeth. Interior trill. We’re rustling open.
    Out of a prohibited body why
    long for melody? Just a thrust of air,
    a little space with which to make this thistling
    sound, stretch of atmosphere to piss through when
    you’re scared shitless. Little sister, the sky
    is falling and I don’t mind, I don’t mind,
    a line a girl, a prophet half my age,
    told me to listen for one summer when
    I was gutless, a big-mouthed carp that drank
    down liters of algae, silt, fragile shale
    while black-winged ospreys plummeted from above.
    3.
    While black-winged ospreys plummeted from above,
    we were born beneath. You know what I mean?
    I’ll tell you what the girls who never love
    us back taught me: The strain within will tune
    the torqued pitch. In 1902 the last
    castrato sang “Ave Maria.”
    His voice—a bifurcated swell. So pure
    a lady screams with ecstasy. Voce
    bianco! Breath control. Hold each note. Extend
    the timbre. Pump the chest, that balloon room,
    and lift pink lips, chin so soft and beardless,
    a flutter, a flourish, a cry stretching beyond
    its range, cruising through four octaves, a warbler,
    a starling with supernatural restraint.
    4.
    A starling with supernatural restraint,
    a tender glissando on a scratched LP,
    his flute could speak catbird and hermit thrush.
    It was the year a war occurred or troops
    were sent while homicide statistics rose;
    I stopped teaching to walkout, my arms linked
    to my students to show a mayor who didn’t
    show. Seven hundred youth leaned on adults
    who leaned back. We had lost another smart kid
    to a bullet in the Fillmore, Sunnyside,
    the Tenderloin. To love without resource
    or peace. When words were noise, a jazz cut was steel.
    I listened for Dolphy’s pipes in the pitch dark:
    A far cry. Epistrophy. A refusal.
    5.
    A far cry. Epistrophy. A refusal.
    A nightingale is recorded in a field
    where finally we meet to touch and sleep.
    A nightingale attests
    as bombers buzz and whir
    overhead enroute to raid.
    We meet undercover of brush and dust.
    We meet to revise what we heard.
    The year I can’t tell you. The past restages
    the future. Palindrome we can’t resolve.
    But the coded trill a fever ascending,
    a Markov chain, discrete equation,
    generative pulse, sweet arrest,
    bronchial junction, harmonic jam.
    6.
    Bronchial junction, harmonic jam,
    her disco dancing shatters laser light.
    Her rock rap screamed through a plastic bullhorn
    could save my life. Now trauma is a remix,
    a beat played back, a circadian pulse we can’t shake,
    inherent in the meter we might speak,
    so with accompaniment I choose to heal
    at a show where every body that I press against
    lip syncs: I’ve got post binary gender chores . . .
    I’ve got to move. Oh, got to move. This box
    is least insufferable when I can feel
    your anger crystallize a few inches away,
    see revolutions in your hips and fists.
    I need a crown to have this dance interlude.
    7.
    I need a crown to have this dance interlude
    or more than one. Heating flapjacks you re-
    read “Danse Russe,” where a man alone and naked
    invents a ballet swinging his shirt around
    his head. Today you’re a dandier nude
    in argyle socks and not lonely as you
    slide down the hall echoing girly tunes
    through a mop handle: You make me feel like. . . .
    She-bop doo wop . . . an original butch
    domestic. The landlord is looking through
    the mini-blinds. Perched on a sycamore,
    a yellow throated warbler measures your
    schisms, fault lines, your taciturn vibrato.
    Tonight, as one crowd, we will bridge this choir.
    from