Dean Young

We all think about suddenly disappearing. The train tracks lead there, into the woods. Even in the financial district: wooden doors in alleyways. First I want to put something small into your hand, a button or river stone or key I don’t know to what. I don’t have that house anymore across from the graveyard and its black angel. What counts as a proper goodbye? My last winter in Iowa there was always a ladybug or two in the kitchen for cheer even when it was ten below. We all feel suspended over a drop into nothingness. Once you get close enough, you see what one is stitching is a human heart. Another is vomiting wings. Hell, even now I love life. Whenever you put your feet on the floor in the morning, whatever the nightmare, it’s a miracle or fantastic illusion: the solidity of the boards, the steadiness coming into the legs. Where did we get the idea when we were kids to rub dirt into the wound or was that just in Pennsylvania? Maybe poems are made of breath, the way water, cajoled to boil, says, This is my soul, freed.

Then I realized I hadn’t secured the boat. Then I realized my friend had lied to me. Then I realized my dog was gone no matter how much I called in the rain. All was change. Then I realized I was surrounded by aliens disguised as orthodontists having a convention at the hotel breakfast bar. Then I could see into the life of things, that systems seek only to reproduce the conditions of their own reproduction. If I had to pick between shadows and essences, I’d pick shadows. They’re better dancers. They always sing their telegrams. Their old gods do not die. Then I realized the very futility was salvation in this greeny entanglement of  breaths. Yeah, as if. Then I realized even when you catch the mechanism, the trick still works. Then I came to in Texas and realized rockabilly would never go away. Then I realized I’d been drugged. We were all chasing nothing which left no choice but to intensify the chase. I came to handcuffed and gagged. I came to intubated and packed in some kind of foam. This too is how ash moves through water. And all this time the side doors unlocked. Then I realized repetition could be an ending. Then I realized repetition could be an ending.

I love when out of nowhere I love when out of nowhere my cat jumps on me and my body isn’t even surprised. Me who wants to be surprised by everything like a dandelion like a bottle cap cricket cricket. I keep waiting for the god under the anthill to speak up. I keep waiting for the part of the myth where everyone turns into a different bird or the reeds start talking or horses come out of the ocean in their parliamentary regalia and cities grow from their hoofprints. I keep waiting for the bugle and the jackal-headed god to weigh my heart across the river. All this daylight in just a few moments pours itself into darkness. More and more I’m satisfied with partial explanations like a fly with one wing, walking.

I like the blue pill best. Just like a gladiola, its true flower is invisible. The rest is holy. Not like in that Tintoretto where no one knows god is dying, just the usual jingle and squawk from the birdmongers then sudden downpour, a few of the demons dwelling beneath the earth tentatively stir. Not like that. Not tentative. Imploring. The wound tingles. A head of foam forms on the mountain. Into my hand is placed a Mycenaean horse. Into my hand is placed a wax hand. The filament will not break. The fox gets closer. Mint barks. 5% of its life, an ant is active. The rest is holy. Wolfhowl ringtone is holy. Sticking out your tongue in the rearview mirror is holy. Any song that never leaves the lungs, all us animals garlanded and belled.

I’m thinking it’s time to go back to the peach farm or rather the peach farm seems to be wanting me back even though the work of picking, sorting, the sticky perils and sudden swarms are done. Okay, full disclosure, I’ve never been on a peach farm, just glimpsed from a car squat trees I assumed were peach and knew a couple in school who went off one summer, so they said, to work on a peach farm. She was pregnant, he didn’t have much intention, canvases of crushed lightbulbs and screws in paste. He’d gotten fired from the lunch counter for putting too much meat on the sandwiches of his friends then ended up in Macy’s in New York selling caviar and she went home I think to Scranton, two more versions of never hearing from someone again. I’d like to say the most important fruits are within but that’s the very sort of bullshit one goes to the peach farm to avoid, not just flight from quadratic equations, waiting for the plumber, finding out your insurance won’t pay. Everyone wants out of the spider’s stomach. Everyone wants to be part of some harvest and stop coughing to death and cursing at nothing and waking up nowhere near an orchard. Look at these baskets, bashed about, nearly ruined with good employ. Often, after you’ve spent a day on a ladder, you dream of angels, the one with the trumpet and free subscriptions to the New Yorker or the archer, the oink angel, angel of ten dollar bills found in the dryer or the one who welcomes you in work gloves and says if you’re caught eating a single peach, even windfall, you’ll be executed. Then laughs. It’s okay, kiddo, long as you’re here, you’re one of us.

The recital of the new optimism was oft interrupted, rudeness in the ramparts, an injured raven that needed attendance, pre-op nudity. The young who knew everything was new made babies who unforeseeably would one day present their complaint. Enough blame to go around but the new optimism didn’t stop, helped one pick up a brush, another a spatula even as the last polar bear sat on his shrinking berg thinking, I have been vicious but my soul is pure. And the new optimism loves the bear’s soul and makes images of it to sell at fair-trade craft fairs with laboriously knotted hunks of rope, photos of cheese, soaps with odd ingredients, whiskey, sand, hamburger drippings, lint, any and everything partaking of the glowing exfoliating cleanup. And the seal is sponged of oil spill. And the broken man is wheeled in a meal. War finally seems stupid enough. You look an animal in the eye before eating it and the gloomy weather makes the lilacs grow. Hello, oceans of air. Your dead cat loves you forever and will welcome you forever home.

"They won't attack us here in the Indian graveyard." I love that moment. And I love the moment when I climb into your warm you-smelling bed-dent after you've risen. And sunflowers, once a whole field and I almost crashed, the next year all pumpkins! Crop rotation, I love you. Dividing words between syl- lables! Dachshunds! What am I but the inter- section of these loves? I spend 35 dollars on a CD of some guy with 15 different guitars in his shack with lots of tape delays and loops, a good buy! Mexican animal crackers! But only to be identified by what you love is a malformation just as embryonic chickens grow very strange in zero gravity. I hate those experiments on animals, varnished bats, blinded rabbits, cows with windows in their flanks but obviously I'm fascinated. Perhaps it was my early exposure to Frankenstein. I love Frankenstein! Arrgh, he replies to everything, fire particularly sets him off, something the villagers quickly pick up. Fucking villagers. All their shouting's making conversation impossible and now there's grit in my lettuce which I hate but kinda like in clams as one bespeaks poor hygiene and the other the sea. I hate what we're doing to the sea, dragging huge chains across the bottom, bleaching reefs. Either you're a rubber/ gasoline salesman or like me, you'd like to duct tape the vice president's mouth to the exhaust pipe of an SUV and I hate feeling like that. I would rather concentrate on the rapidity of your ideograms, how only a biochemical or two keeps me from becoming the world's biggest lightning bug.

You can read almost anything about angels, how they bite off the heads first, copulate with tigers, tortured Miles Davis until he stuck a mute in his trumpet to torture them back. The pornographic magazines ported into the redwoods. The sweetened breath of the starving. The prize livestock rolls over on her larval young, the wooden dwarf turning in the cogs of the clockworks. I would have a black bra hanging from the shower rod. I would have you up against the refrigerator with its magnets for insurance agents and oyster bars. Miracles, ripped thumbnails, everything a piece of something else, archangelic, shadow-clawed, the frolicking despair of repeating decimals because it never comes out even. Mostly the world is lava’s rhythm, the impurities of darkness sometimes called stars. Mostly the world is assignations, divorces conducted between rooftops. Forever and forever the checkbook unbalanced, the beautiful bodies bent back like paper clips, the discharged blandishing cardboard signs by the exits. Coppers and silvers and radiant traces, gold flecks from our last brush, brushfires. Always they’re espousing accuracy when it’s accident, the arrow not in the aimed-for heart but throat that has the say. There are no transitions, only falls.

An end is always punishment for a beginning. If you’re Catholic, sadness is punishment for happiness, you become the bug you squash if you’re Hindu, a flinty space opens in your head after a long night of laughter and wine. For waking there are dreams, from French poetry, English poetry, for light fire although sometimes fire must be punished by light which is why psychotherapy had to be invented. A father may say nothing to a son for years. A wife may keep something small folded deep in her underwear drawer. Clouds come in resembling the terrible things we believe about ourselves, a rock comes loose from a ledge, the baby just cries and cries. Doll in a chair, windshield wipers, staring off into the city lights. For years you may be unable to hear the word monkey without a stab in the heart because she called you that the summer she thought she loved you and you thought you loved someone else and everyone loved your salad dressing. And the daffodils come up in the spring and the snow covers the road in winter and the water covers the deep trenches in the sea where all the time the inner stuff of this earth surges up which is how the continents are made and broken.

Is everything a field of energy caused by human projection? From the crib bars hang the teething tools. Above the finger-drummed desk, a bit lip. The cyclone fence of buts surrounds the soccer field of what if. Sometimes it seems like a world where no one knows what he or she is doing, eight lanes both directions. How about a polymer that contracts in response to electrical charge? A swimming pool on the 18th floor? King Lear done by sock puppets? Anyone who has traveled here knows the discrepancies between idea and fact. The idea is the worm in the tequila and the next day is the fact. In between may be the sacred—real blood from the wooden virgin’s eyes, and the hoax— landing sites in cornfields. Maybe ideas are best sprung from actions like the children of Zeus. One gives us elastic and the omelette, another nightmares and SUVs. There’s considerable wobble in the system, and the fan belt screams, waking the baby. Swaying in the darkened nursery, kissing the baby-smelling head: good idea! But also sadness looking at the sea. The stranded whale, guided out of the cove by tugboats, turns and swims back in. The violinist will not let go her violin which is 200 years old and still on the train thus she is dragged down the track. By what manner is the soul joined to the body? Answer: an arm connecting a violin to a violinist. According to Freud, there are no accidents. Astrologists and Presbyterians agree for different reasons. You fall down the stairs with a birthday cake. You try to fit a blunderbuss into a laptop. Human consciousness: is it the projector or the screen? They come in orange jumpsuits and spray the grass so everything dies but the grass. It is too late to ask Kafka what he thinks. Sometimes they give you a box of ash, a handshake, and the rest is your problem. In one version, the beggar turns out to be a king and grants the poor couple a castle and a moat and two silver horses said to be sired by the wind. That was before dentistry, which might have been a better gift. You did not want to get sick in the 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th or 18th centuries. So too the 19th and 20th were to be avoided but the doctor coming to bleed you is the master of the short story. After the kiss from whom he will never know, the lieutenant, going home, touches a bush in which birds are singing.