The Best American Poetry 2009 by David Wagoner

Author:David Wagoner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

(for Ryk Ekedal)

Disdained, the prose poem, by Walcott, his bluewater lilt curmudgeoned. Dismissed.

No reason not to divide with a dot

I hear America calling for a dot

Sometimes a line strings possibilities too short to save—as

in an Agnes Martin drawing that fine rule won’t quite reach the edge. And Freud

said the way back from fantasy to reality is art: well good luck, poem.

Feels a stranger to what’s lyric poetry now, Walcott said, bluewater

lilt rising, and poetry is the language of grief he said.

Love lost, grief is—the poem sails on

afloat a dapple of pitch and roll, land rarely in line, so hard to tell

cargo from crates on a dock, what might groan timbers to

matchsticks and

sink us. Love comes to grief when so little by our effort is left to be won.

Americans for God’s sake why don’t you write about empire, Walcott growled.

Either for it or against! O but we can’t see it that way.

As a Caribbean you feel the

soles of our feet but we feel the sand. Used to be

our business was business: steel, fine tolerances at speed—

Scott Fitzgerald driving drunk into the eye.

Now our America means this infinite

line, a bridge dot to dot: and each island bridged loses its bluewater name

and memory. Art couldn’t carry us all the way back.

Still the prose poem, however keenly

off, its nose broken by masters,

snubs empire. Or misses the point. Or so I float as far as I got. True

too that lines in their shimmer (as a bridge over bentwood and hollow)

spell the deeps—those taut strings. How the lyric can lie yet the grief sound through.

from Fulcrum

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