James Richardson, “By the Numbers”

Last bells of evening, toning bronze
and bronze, a hint of plaint.
Even if I hadn’t heard the shuttering board,
the splash, the laughter, I’d have known
from the quaver of voices over water
that this is the last house in summer,
and now is the double loeliness
of missing a party you don’t even want to be at.

The T’ang poet sets out on a thousand-mile journey,
minor administrative post in prospect,
chronic war rattling around the mountains
that might last all his life. And someone else
returns from a journey no one knows he’s been on,
feeling again the thick air of the valley—
the children so tall—and whatever happens to love
that hasn’t been used enough, has happened.
He spreads before them, as excuse or evidence,
what he has gathered, mottoes of gods and sages,
spells, strange weathers and archaic praises,
currency unfamiliar in this land.

Jame’s Richardson’s By the Numbers was one of the shortlisted titles for this year’s National Book Award for poetry. It also includes “End of Summer,” “In Shakespeare,” and “Subject, Verb, Object” (The New Yorker), plus three poems originally published in Narrative (free subscription required): “Echo,” “Bit Parts,” and “Are We Alone? or Physics You Can Do at Home.”

19 November 2010 | poetry |

Terrance Hayes, “Snow for Wallace Stevens”

No one living a snowed-in life
can sleep without a blindfold.
Light is the lion that comes down to drink.
I know tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk
holds nearly the same sound as a bottle.
Drink and drank and drunk-a-drunk-drunk,
light is the lion that comes down.
This song is for the wise man who avenges
by building his city in snow.
For his decorations in a nigger cemetery.
How, with pipes of winter
lining his cognition, does someone learn
to bring a sentence to its knees?
Who is not more than his limitations?
Who is not the blood in a wine barrel
and the wine as well? I too, having lost faith
in language, have placed my faith in language.
Thus, I have a capacity for love without
forgiveness. This song is for my foe,
the clean-shaven, gray-suited, gray patron
of Hartford, the emperor of whiteness
blue as a body made of snow.

Terrance Hayes won the 2010 National Book Award for poetry for his fourth collection, Lighthead. Other poems in this collection include “The Golden Shovel” (Poetry Daily), “God Is an American” (Guernica), and “Carp Poem” (Konundrum Engine).

Several other poems were published in Poetry, including “Mystic Bounce,” “Cocktails with Orpheus,” and “New Folk.” And you can find more at the Academy of American Poets website: “Lighthead’s Guide to the Galaxy,” plus audio recordings of Shakur and “Liner Notes to an Imaginary Playlist.”

18 November 2010 | poetry |