founded in 1912 by harriet monroe September 2012 FOUNDED IN 1912 BY HARRIET MONROE volume cc • number 5 CONTENTS September 2012 POEMS jane hirshfield 431 Fado Like Two Negative Numbers Multiplied by Rain My Weather Things keep sorting themselves. Like the Small Hole by the Path-Side Something Lives in joan hutton landis 436 The Plan frederick seidel 437 Snow Mount Street Gardens The State of New York Oedipal Strivings Victory Parade What Next john de stefano 446 From “Critical Opalescence and the Blueness of the Sky” billy collins 448 Report from the Subtropics Cheerios ange mlinko 450 The Grind deborah paredez 452 The Gulf, 1987 Wife’s Disaster Manual dana levin 454 My Sentence Urgent Care mary karr 458 Read These Suicide’s Note: An Annual john koethe 461 Book X james longenbach 464 By the Same Author Opus Posthumous COMMENT a.e. stallings 469 Austerity Measures: A Letter from Greece william logan 483 Going, Going beverley bie brahic 493 No Fish Were Killed in the Writing of These Poems letters to the editor 499 contributors 503 back page 519 Editor christian wiman Senior Editor don share Associate Editor fred sasaki Managing Editor valerie jean johnson Editorial Assistant lindsay garbutt Reader christina pugh Art Direction winterhouse studio cover art by oded ezer “Scribble Pegasus,” 2012 POETRYMAGAZINE.ORG a publication of the POETRY FOUNDATION printed by cadmus professional communications, us Poetry • September 2012 • Volume 200 • Number 5 Poetry (issn: 0032-2032) is published monthly, except bimonthly July / August, by the Poetry Foundation. 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POEMS jane hirshfield Fado A man reaches close and lifts a quarter from inside a girl’s ear, from her hands takes a dove she didn’t know was there. Which amazes more, you may wonder: the quarter’s serrated murmur against the thumb or the dove’s knuckled silence? That he found them, or that she never had, or that in Portugal, this same half-stopped moment, it’s almost dawn, and a woman in a wheelchair is singing a fado that puts every life in the room on one pan of a scale, itself on the other, and the copper bowls balance. JANE HIRSHFIELD 431 Like Two Negative Numbers Multiplied by Rain Lie down, you are horizontal. Stand up, you are not. I wanted my fate to be human. Like a perfume that does not choose the direction it travels, that cannot be straight or crooked, kept out or kept. Yes, No, Or — a day, a life, slips through them, taking off the third skin, taking off the fourth. And the logic of shoes becomes at last simple, an animal question, scuffing. Old shoes, old roads — the questions keep being new ones. Like two negative numbers multiplied by rain into oranges and olives. 432 POETRY My Weather Wakeful, sleepy, hungry, anxious, restless, stunned, relieved. Does a tree also? A mountain? A cup holds sugar, flour, three large rabbit-breaths of air. I hold these. JANE HIRSHFIELD 433 Things keep sorting themselves. Does the butterfat know it is butterfat, milk know it’s milk? No. Something just goes and something remains. Like a boardinghouse table: men on one side, women on the other. Nobody planned it. Plaid shirts next to one another, talking in accents from the Midwest. Nobody plans to be a ghost. Later on, the young people sit in the kitchen. Soon enough, they’ll be the ones to stumble Excuse me and quickly withdraw. But they don’t know that. No one can ever know that. 434 POETRY Like the Small Hole by the Path-Side Something Lives in Like the small hole by the path-side something lives in, in me are lives I do not know the names of, nor the fates of, nor the hungers of or what they eat. They eat of me. Of small and blemished apples in low fields of me whose rocky streams and droughts I do not drink. And in my streets — the narrow ones, unlabeled on the self-map — they follow stairs down music ears can’t follow, and in my tongue borrowed by darkness, in hours uncounted by the self-clock, they speak in restless syllables of other losses, other loves. There too have been the hard extinctions, missing birds once feasted on and feasting. There too must be machines like loud ideas with tungsten bits that grind the day. A few escape. A mercy. They leave behind small holes that something unweighed by the self-scale lives in. JANE HIRSHFIELD 435 joan hutton landis The Plan For Ann Forsythe Irwin Bourgois Remembering Ann Whose beauty began At the crown of her head And ran to the deep underneath Of her feet — Never aware of her own élan. Now, half mad with pain, She crawls through her rooms, Calling for doctors, Falling, Forgetting, Consumed, Trepanned. Ever since the world began — Star fall Nightfall Bomb fall Downfall ... Read the scan: Every woman and every man, Once a flowered Palestine, Falls blindly toward the Nakba — Bald catastrophe, Prescription — According to the Plan. 436 POETRY frederick seidel Snow Snow is what it does. It falls and it stays and it goes. It melts and it is here somewhere. We all will get there. FREDERICK SEIDEL 437 Mount Street Gardens I’m talking about Mount Street. Jackhammers give it the staggers. They’re tearing up dear Mount Street. It’s got a torn-up face like Mick Jagger’s. I mean, this is Mount Street! Scott’s restaurant, the choicest oysters, brilliant fish; Purdey, the great shotgun maker — the street is complete Posh plush and (except for Marc Jacobs) so English. Remember the old Mount Street, The quiet that perfumed the air Like a flowering tree and smelled sweet As only money can smell, because after all this was Mayfair? One used to stay at the Connaught Till they closed it for a makeover. One was distraught To see the dark wood brightened and sleekness take over. Designer grease Will help guests slide right into the zone. Prince Charles and his design police Are tickled pink because it doesn’t threaten the throne. I exaggerate for effect — But isn’t it grand, the stink of the stank, That no sooner had the redone hotel just about got itself perfect Than the local council decided: new street, new sidewalk, relocate the taxi rank! 438 POETRY Turn away from your life — away from the noise! — Leaving the Connaught and Carlos Place behind. Hidden away behind those redbrick buildings across the street are serious joys: Green grandeur on a small enough scale to soothe your mind, And birdsong as liquid as life was before you were born. Whenever I’m in London I stop by this delightful garden to hear The breeze in the palatial trees blow its shepherd’s horn. I sit on a bench in Mount Street Gardens and London is nowhere near. FREDERICK SEIDEL 439 The State of New York I like the part I play. They’ve cast me as Pompeii The day before the day. It’s my brilliant performance as a luxury man because I act that way. They say: Just wait, you’ll see, you’ll pay, Pompeii. You’re a miracle in a whirlpool In your blind date’s vagina At your age. Nothin could be fina. You eat off her bone china. Don’t be a ghoul. Don’t be a fool, You fool. In the lifelong month of May, Racing joyously on his moto poeta to the grave, He’s his own fabulous slave. He rides his superbike faster and faster to save His master from the coming lava from China, every day, But especially today, because it’s on its way. Fred Astaire is about to explode In his buff-colored kidskin gloves, revolving around The gold knob of his walking stick, with the sound Of Vesuvia playing, And the slopes of Vesuvia saying Her effluvia are in nearly overflowing mode. Freud had predicted Fred. In The Future of an Illusion he said: “Movies are, in other words, the future of God.” Nothing expresses ordinary wishes more dysplastically than current American politics do.