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This book is for Adam Boles and Jude Countryman—
After this deluge
I wish to see the dove
saved,
nothing but the dove.
I would drown in this sea
if it did not fly away,
if it did not return with the leaf
in the final hour.
“Nach dieser Sintflut,” Ingeborg Bachmann
Contents
*
1 Someone Asks, What Makes This Poem American?
4 I Growed No Potatoes To Write About, Sir
5 When at a Certain Party in NYC
6 H. Res. 21-1: Proposing the Ban of Push-Up Bras, Etc.
7 How We Count in the South
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1 12-Step
2 Perfect
3 Burying It
4 Olentangy River
5 Fathers Never Answer
6 Victoria Station
7 Time Machine
8 The Problem of the Domestic
9 Energy Policy
*
1 With Birds
2 “A Rottenness Begins in His Conduct”
3 Poem of Philosophical and Parental Conundrums Written in an Election Year
4 Love Letter: Final Visitation
5 Field
6 Après Moi
ARS POETICA FOR THE FUTURE
The Rapture came
and went without incident,
but I put off folding my laundry,
just in case.
Also, from my inbox this morning,
subject header:
“Lesbian Torture Camps.”
The mind ricochets like a fly—
is there anything left for people
to do to people?
Meanwhile, my boyfriend
looks forward to the apocalypse
as a retirement party
he pretends he won’t be
attending, like the characters
in the movie who climb the highest
building, wanting to be the first
to welcome the spaceship.
In this world,
I’ve given up sleep for dreaming
and art is still our only flying car,
but I can’t recall when anticipation
became the substitute for hope.
Recently, C. said, “Now we begin
the poems of our Great Middle Period.”
I imagine digging a series of small
holes, burying poems in Ziploc
baggies. I imagine them as baby teeth
knocked from the present’s mouth.
SOMEONE ASKS, WHAT MAKES THIS POEM AMERICAN?
And I answer by driving around, which seems
to me the most American of activities, up there
with waving the incendiary dandelion of sparklers
or eating potato salad with green specks of relish,
the German kind, salad of immigrants, of all
the strange, pickled things we carry
over from other places, like we did on Easter
mornings