These will show you the range of this stellar issue.
First, from Kate Greenstreet, a poem I think of as an American haiku. With typical American excess, it expands the haiku’s first and third lines into two lines each. And with typical American inclusion, those line-pairs pack in so many tones and registers that they earn their abundance.
“but even now I am perhaps not speaking”
He was alone in that house.
There was a door, a social context.
I often wanted to enter his home.
He has a camera, too.
I don’t say that lightly.
My next choice surprises me. Almost everything about it is in opposition to my “usual” “tastes.” Still, I find it one of the most memorable poems in the volume. You may think you have it pegged as a plainspoken, straightforward narrative memory poem; you may think, as I usually do, that the time for this sort of poem is past. For me, the end—where the conventions of the mode require an epiphany—is unexpected and complex and suggestive of hard-come-by truth.
Next Door
My first political argument was with Mr. Burt.
I was 14. I don’t remember the exact topic
but it was something like: Republicans suck
or: Who gives a crap about the middle east?
Mr. Burt took me seriously enough to explain
the doctrine of America’s Sphere of Influence
and I listened because we were riding in his Cadillac
back from the Jets-Dolphins game at Shea Stadium
to which he was generous enough to take me
along with his three sons, who kept quiet
as their father spoke about oil, Israel, protecting
U.S. interests, and I’m sorry for remembering him lifting
one hip slightly from the plush leather seat to break wind,
then saying Excuse me without the least bit of shyness.
He didn’t convince me of anything, though I knew
there was something very right about this man
despite his views and his money and that fart
because I grew up watching the Burt’s next door,
a hive of visitors, hors d’oeuvres on the deck
bordered by Mrs. Burt’s roses, Patty and Chris
home from college, Timmy in the garage under his Corvette,
Tonya the Fresh Air kid come for the summer,
always a new tapestry or painting, recipes to try,
games in the basement, skis on top of the car,
Golden Retriever, fire in the hearth, sunset
through windows entirely different from ours.
It wasn’t wealth or politics that got tickets to the Jets,
it was life, and they had more of it than we did.