Free The Best American Poetry 2013 by David Lehman Page A

not to mention poison draughts
    and black-sailed death ships and blood-dripping
    broadswords, there’s the yummy part, where, in Denis
    de Rougemont’s words, Tristan and Isolde are
    â€œexiled into ecstasy.” See, that would be excellent,
    right, reader? You’d be exiled from your usual pleasures,
    like dollar-off dry cleaning every Thursday and so-called
    organic vegetables that are not grown by any method
    verifiable by science but that you eat anyway. But you
    wouldn’t care. You’d be all ecstatic! Fashion maven Diana
    Vreeland says, “Elegance is refusal.” She also said, “Pink
    is the navy blue of India,” and I don’t know what
    that means, either. But it sounds good, right? Sounds like a secret.
    from Plume

NOELLE KOCOT
Aphids

    The long-legged aphids, rich in their summertime,
    The anchorite rolling around on the wet grass,
    Amulet of a constellation, oh, it speaks louder
    Than any church bell! I am here, at the tea table,
    And the curio is very small. I drag the alphabet
    To and fro, and drink non-alcoholic cocktails by
    The muddy creek. Someone, tell me my life already,
    Someone reliable—the phone psychics all suck,
    And besides, that’s playing with demons. If I dis-
    Connect my woolly body from what I am inured
    To use, tell me what grief lingers in a medieval
    Box, the universal liquor of a swinging child. I
    Don’t know where I’m headed, but the star-lit trees
    Above my path never go out. They sing songs to me
    In the daytime, and their music boxes are as snows
    Falling. Sometimes I peek, as the aphids eat at the road.
    from Conduit

JOHN KOETHE
Eggheads

    In the fifties people who were smart
    And looked smart were called eggheads.
    Adlai Stevenson, who was bald and went to Princeton,
    Was the quintessential egghead, and so he lost
    To Dwight Eisenhower, the president of Columbia.
    Dave Brubeck was an egghead, with his horn-rimmed
    Glasses and all those albums of jazz at colleges,
    Though on NPR last week he claimed he wasn’t smart.
    I took piano lessons from his brother Howard
    In the Thearle Music Building in San Diego in the fifties,
    Which probably would have made me an egghead by contagion
    If it hadn’t been for Sputnik, which made being smart
    Fashionable for a while (as long as you didn’t look smart).
    Beatniks weren’t eggheads: eggheads were uptight
    And buttoned down, wore black shoes instead of sandals
    And didn’t play bongo drums or read poetry in coffee houses.
    What sent me on this memory trip was the realization
    That stupidity was in style again, in style with a vengeance—
    Not that it was ever out of style, or confined to politics
    (“We need more show and less tell,” wrote an editor of Poetry
    About a poem of mine that he considered too abstract).
    The new stupidity doesn’t have a name or a characteristic look,
    And it’s not just in style, it is a style, a style of seeing everything as style,
    Like Diesel jeans, or glasses and T-shirts, or a way of talking on TV:
    Art as style, science as a style, and intelligence as a style too,
    Perhaps the egghead style without the smarts. It’s politics
    Where stupidity and style combine to form the perfect storm,
    As a host of stylized, earnest airheads emerge from the greenrooms
    Of the Sunday morning talk shows, mouthing talking points
    In chorus, playing their parts with panache and glowing with the glow
    You get from a fact-free diet, urged on by a diminutive senator
    Resembling a small, furious gerbil. If consistency is the hobgoblin
    Of little minds, these minds are enormous, like enormous rooms.
    It wasn’t always like this. Maybe it wasn’t much better,
    But I used to like politics. I used to like arguing with Paul Arnson
    On the Luther League bus, whatever it was we argued about.
    It was more like a pastime, since if things were only getting better
    Incrementally, at least they weren’t steadily getting