The Best American Poetry 2012 by David Lehman Page B

to the room
    I am composed of the notes
    from The Cincinnati Review

JAMES KIMBRELL

    How to Tie a Knot

    If I eat a diet of rain and nuts, walk to the P.O.
    in a loincloth, file for divorce from the world of matter,
    say not-it! to the sea oats, not-it! to the sky
    above the disheveled palms, not-it! to the white or green oyster boats
    and the men on the bridge with their fishing rods
    that resemble so many giant whiskers,
    if I repeat this is not-it, this is not why I’m waiting here,
    will I fill the universe with all that is not-it
    and allow myself to grow very still in the center of
    this fishing town in winter? Will I look out past the cat
    sleeping in the windowsill and say not-it garbage can,
    not-it Long’s Video Store, until I happen upon what
    is not not-it? Will I wake up and BEHOLD!
    the “actual,” the “real,” the “awe-thentic,” the IS?
    Instead I walk down to the Island Quicky, take a pound
    of bait shrimp in an ice-filled baggy, then walk to the beach
    to catch my dinner. Now waiting is the work
    I’m waiting for. Now the sand crane dive-bombs the surf
    of his own enlightenment because everything
    is bait and lust and hard-up for supper.
    I came out here to pare things down,
    wanted to be wind, simple as sand, to hear each note
    in the infinite orchestra of waves fizzling out
    beneath the rotting dock at five o’clock in the afternoon
    when the voice that I call I is a one-man boat
    slapping toward the shore of a waning illusion.
    Hello, waves of salty and epiphanic distance. Good day,
    bird who will eventually
    go blind from slamming headfirst into the water.
    What do you say, fat flounder out there
    deep in your need, looking like sand speckled with shells,
    lying so still you’re hardly there, lungs lifting
    with such small air, flesh both succulent and flakey
    when baked with white wine, lemon and salt, your eyes
    rolling toward their one want when the line jerks, and the reel
    clicks, and the rod bends, and you give up
    the ocean floor for a mouthful of land.
    from The Cincinnati Review

NOELLE KOCOT

    Poem

    With deepest reverence,
    I shop for bones.
    And what is the candy
    And the daylight
    And the horse without hunger?
    Too many ducts for us to think of,
    And here we are punishing the
    Lines above our faces.
    Enormity is a hoof
    With unanswerable sounds,
    And the void is filled with fire.
    My dream is to fall apart,
    To cry for a century,
    But I have not cried, not at all.
    I keep my distance like the tines
    Of a fork from one another,
    Dressing, undressing the fabulous wounds.
    But now, back to our story,
    It has coffee in it, a naked river.
    Blessed are we who rapture
    An electric wire, blessed be
    The falling things about our faces,
    Blessed is the socket of an eye
    That lights the body, because
    In the end, in the very end, it’s
    Just you. You and you. And you.
    from New American Writing

MAXINE KUMIN

    Either Or

    Death, in the orderly procession
    of random events on this gradually
    expiring planet crooked in a negligible
    arm of a minor galaxy adrift among
    millions of others bursting apart in
    the amnion of space, will, said Socrates,
    be either a dreamless slumber without end
    or a migration of the soul from one place
    to another, like the shadow of smoke rising
    from the backroom woodstove that climbs
    the trunk of the ash tree outside
    my window and now that the sun is up
    down come two red squirrels and a nuthatch.
    Later we are promised snow.
    So much for death today and long ago.
    from Ploughshares

SARAH LINDSAY

    Hollow Boom Soft Chime: The Thai Elephant Orchestra

    A sound of far-off thunder from instruments
    ten feet away: drums, a log,
    a gong of salvage metal. Chimes
    of little Issan bells, pipes in a row, sometimes
    a querulous harmonica.
    Inside the elephant orchestra’s audience,
    bubbles form, of shame and joy, and burst.
    Did elephants look so sad and wise,
    a tourist thinks, her camera cold in her pocket,
    before we came