Free The Best American Poetry 2012 by David Lehman Page A

happiness
    should be the outcome of his theory—
    those who take pleasure
    will produce offspring who’ll take pleasure,
    though he concedes the advantage of the animal who keeps death in mind
    and so is vigilant.
    And doesn’t vigilance call for
    at least an ounce of expectation,
    imagining the lion’s tooth inside your neck already,
    for you to have your best chance of outrunning the lion
    on the arrival of the lion.
    3.
    When it comes time to “dedicate the merit”
    my Buddhist friends chant from the ocean of samsara
    may I free all beings —
    at first I misremembered, and thought
    the word for the seed the same.
    Meaning “the wheel of birth and misery and death,”
    nothing in between the birth and death but misery,
    surely an overzealous bit of whittlework
    on the part of Webster’s Third New International Unabridged
    (though if you eliminate dogs and pie and swimming
    feels about right to me—
    oh shut up, Lucia. The rule is: you can’t nullify the world
    in the middle of your singing.)
    4.
    In the Autonomous Vehicle Laboratory
    Roboseed is flying.
    It is not a sorrow though its motor makes an annoying sound.
    The doctoral students have calculated
    the correct thrust-to-weight ratio and heave dynamics.
    On YouTube you can watch it flying in the moonlight
    outside the engineering building with the fake Ionic columns.
    I said “sorrow” for the fear that in the future all the beauties
    will be replaced by replicas that have more glare and blare and bling.
    Roboseed, roborose, roboheart, robosoul—
    this way there’ll be no blight
    on any of the cherished encapsulations
    when the blight was what we loved.
    5.
    They grow in chains from the Bigleaf Maple, chains
    that lengthen until they break.
    In June,
    when the days are long and the sky is full
    and the swept pile thickens
    with the ones grown brown and brittle,
    oh see how I’ve underestimated the persistence
    of the lace in their one wing.
    6.
    Is there no slim chance I will feel it
    when some molecule of me
    (annealed by fire, like coal or glass)
    is drawn up in the phloem of a maple
    (please scatter my ashes under a maple)
    so my speck can blip out
    on a stem sprouting out of the fork of a branch,
    the afterthought of a flower
    that was the afterthought of a bud,
    transformed now into a seed with a wing,
    like the one I wore on the tip of my nose
    back when I was green.
    from The American Poetry Review

ROBERT PINSKY

    Improvisation on Yiddish

    I’ve got you in my pocket, Ich hob mir fer pacht.
    It sees me and I cannot spell it.
    Ich hob dich in bud, which means I see you as if
    You were in the bathtub naked: I know you completely.
    Kischkas: guts. Tongue of the guts, tongue
    Of the heart naked, the guts of the tongue.
    Bubbeh loschen. Tongue of my grandmother
    That I can’t spell in these characters I know.
    I know “Hob dich in bud” which means I see you
    And through you, tongue of irony. Intimate.
    Tongue of the dear and the dead, tongue of death.
    Tongue of laughing in the guts, naked and completely.
    Bubbeh loschen, lost tongue of the lost, “Get away
    From me” which means, come closer : Gei
    Avek fun mir, Ich hob dich in bud. I see you
    Completely. Naked. I’ve got you in my pocket.
    from The Threepenny Review

DEAN RADER

    Self-Portrait as Dido to Aeneas

    We wake: the night star-scorched & stained, morning fetal and uncoiling:
    everything lifting: treehush and moondive: you at the window, the window
    at day’s limn. The day (heart’s fulcrum) lists. Hear me: even if the bed
    is an iron net, and the mattress a cage of twine and sawgrass: even if my legs
    are bars and my arms are bars, the body’s chain of sweat and skin
    is no prison: it’s the floating cell of the ship that will lock you down.
    from The Cincinnati Review

SPENCER REECE

    The Road to Emmaus

    for Nathan Gebert
    I.
    The chair from Goodwill smelled of mildew.
    I sat with Sister Ann, a