Free The Best American Poetry 2013 by David Lehman

after us,
    and beneath us the base has disappeared, the rows
    of pink houses all the way to the ocean—gone,
    and the whole city has slipped off the white earth
    like a table being cleared for lunch.
    We set up for a few weeks at a time
    in places like Estonia or Laos—
    places where they still have legends,
    where a town of women appearing in the middle of the night
    is surprising but not unheard of. The locals come to watch
    our strange carnival unpacking in some wheat field
    outside Paldiski—we invite them in for coffee,
    forgetting for a minute
    that some of our own men won’t come home again;
    and sometimes, a wife or two won’t either.
    She’ll meet someone else, say, and
    it’s one of those things we don’t talk about,
    how people fall in and out of love,
    and also, what the chaplains are for.
    And then, a few days before the planes fly in
    we return. We roll out the sidewalks and make the beds,
    tether the trees to the yard.
    On the airfield, everything is as it should be—
    our matte red lipstick, the babies blanketed inside strollers.
    Only, our husbands look at us a little sadly,
    the way people do when they know
    they have changed but don’t want to say it.
    Instead they say, What have you been doing all this time?
    And we say, Oh you know, the dishes,
    and they laugh and say,
    Thank God some things stay the same.
    from Southwest Review

DAVID KIRBY
Pink Is the Navy Blue of India

    Flea market guy tells me the pornos are five dollars
    each or three for ten and then leans in conspiratorially
    to say “get you a bunch,” which is sound advice from
    his perspective, I’m so sure, though I could watch them
    all and still not know more than I do now. Friend tells me
    he likes this woman we see in a bar, and when I point out
    that she’s wearing a ring, he says when women wear rings,
    it just means they “do it”—of course, we’d have to ask
    their handsome husbands about that, wouldn’t we! Also,
    was sex better in olden days? In the movies, people from
    roughly the Dark Ages through Victorian times are always
    wearing clothes when they do it, and the guys seem
    to be having all the fun, if by “fun” you mean a fumbling
    upskirts ram job that looks more like mixed martial arts
    than making love, which, I realize, can take different
    forms, depending on the preferences, time available,
    and chemical states of the doer as well as the doee or,
    in the most desirable version, the two co-doers,
    who would thereby be co-doees as well. Still, repression’s
    got a lot going for it: from the repressed mind
    comes beautiful stories, whereas from the liberated mind comes
    websites that show women having sex with vegetables.
    Want an example of a beautiful story? Take Tristan
    and Isolde : Isolde of Ireland is betrothed to King
    Mark of Cornwall, who sends his nephew, Tristan,
    to Ireland to escort Isolde back to Cornwall. Big mistake!
    They do it, King Mark finds out, everything
    goes to hell in a handbasket. So what makes it a beautiful story?
    Not because it ends happily, which it so doesn’t,
    but because everyone fulfills his or her nature, stays
    in character, does what’s right for them and nobody else.
    â€œIt is unbelievable that Tristan should ever be in a position
    to marry Isolde,” writes Swiss critic Denis de Rougemont
    in his monumental study Love in the Western
    World , for “she typifies the woman a man does not marry . . .
    once she became his wife she would no longer be what
    she is, and he would no longer love her. Just think of
    a Madame Tristan!” Wait, let me try. No, you’re right,
    Denis—can’t be done! But until things go all pear-shaped
    for the lovers, there’s a huge payoff: between
    the beginning of the story, where everybody’s just
    walking around and shaking hands with one another,
    and the end, which is filled with the usual shouting
    and finger-pointing,