Free The Best American Poetry 2013 by David Lehman Page B

worse:
    Politicians put their heads together when they had to, Fredric March
    And Franchot Tone gave their speeches about democracy and shared values
    In Seven Days in May and Advise and Consent , and we muddled through.
    Everett Dirksen, Jacob Javits, Charles Percy—remember them?
    They weren’t eggheads or Democrats (let alone beatniks), yet they could
    Talk to eggheads and Democrats (I’m not sure about beatniks),
    And sometimes even agreed with them. It was such an innocent time,
    Even if it didn’t seem particularly innocent at the time, yet a time
    That sowed the seeds of its own undoing. I used to listen to the radio,
    Curious as to what the right was on about now, but I’m not curious anymore,
    Just apprehensive about the future. I’d rather listen to “Take Five”
    Or watch another movie, secure in the remembrance of my own complacency,
    The complacency of an age that everyone thought would last forever
    â€”As indeed it has, but only in the imagination of a past that feels fainter
    And fainter as I write, more and more distant from a bedroom where I lie awake
    Remembering Sputnik and piano lessons, bongo drums and beatniks, quaint
    Old-fashioned Republicans and Democrats and those eggheads of yore.
    from The Virginia Quarterly Review

DOROTHEA LASKY
Poem for Anne Sexting

    Beautiful Anne
    I had not seen you for so long
    But then I saw you again
    In the form
    Was it Angelo?
    What was his name? The other man.
    But that wasn’t him
    What story is it that will be the real one?
    Icy eyes and the smoothest skin
    That’s the way I remember you
    On walks to the hospital
    Light gold suitcase in tow
    She too had your skin
    Clear and faintly rosy
    Immaculate also in white dress
    With black headband
    The other Anne had kohl-lined eyes yes
    Below electric eel lids, Deco crystal cuff on right arm
    She sipped her words
    Almost Cleopatra
    The lamplight on that face
    To say the thing I couldn’t
    To say the word
    I couldn’t say
    You wore the blackest clips in your short hair
    I saw a pantoum leg across the table from mine
    Anne Sexton, your black hair is always in my memory
    To see it shine along winter seascape
    While I bit your black heart
    No you bit mine
    No not black
    What bit
    Your heart was as red as anything
    Although even the other Anne’s lips parted were not red
    No no they were blue
    No no green
    No not that. They were mine.
    from Conduit

DORIANNE LAUX
Song

    Let me sing, dear heart,
    in these dark hours.
    Let me suck the chilled wind
    through the spaces
    between my teeth.
    Let me follow you
    past the trashcans
    stuffed with oily rags
    as you strain under
    the awkward weight
    of the metal ladder
    and traipse the perimeter
    of the house, lean it
    against the roof
    where it will sing
    in the weak, brief sun,
    rung by tin rung,
    and I’ll hold it steady
    while you climb,
    my beloved, to the gutters
    of dead leaves, sodden
    by rain, swarming
    with worms and bird droppings,
    and scoop them
    in your gloved hands
    like a wild-haired surgeon
    excising gobbets of decay,
    pulling the dark muck up,
    proffering it, glistening,
    to the light, before christening it
    a clogful, burning, hurtful stuff,
    and flinging the muddied clump
    with a delirious thud
    onto the bright new grass.
    Let me sing of your strong, wide back
    and bucktoothed grin,
    your threadbare jeans
    that slip down your hips
    with each stretch and reach
    of the clustered muscles
    beneath your scarred arms.
    I could drown in joy.
    Time is no friend. I can’t
    love you more and so,
    my Ascension angel,
    my husband, my hinged window,
    my triptych, my good right side,
    my open door, my bowl
    of foreign coins, let me praise
    your raised fist
    gripping the slick layers
    of our falls, our winters,
    the fires you will build
    from windfall branches,
    the thousands of suppers
    we will share without speaking
    in front of the TV, our bodies
    dropped like rag dolls
    onto the torn velvet couch,
    my hand on your bent