Dean Young

I’m amazed we haven’t crawled off by now. Later we could go back and cross things out, that way we wouldn’t know where we came from, the shapes we asked to be bent into. Sinatra’d be okay again, mother the same distal approximation, the sea still trying to spit it out. Sometimes your sleep is different than mine. I can’t catch up. I don’t know—there are voices tangled outside. Wind wants to make me correct something, the refrigerator says something needs to be pushed further from the sun. Out where the sunset ends, they’ve installed a graveyard and where it rises, some automatons bash together mellifluous metal tubing imparting a festive contusion to the usual calm disaster of getting out of bed. To find out why life has this glass sparkle at the end of a dark hall. To find out why the paper skeleton holds its hands demurely over its crotch. Did it fall that way? To find out how we fell. There is a name to wake into and music to sleep through. To find out where the blood comes from on the towels. Old friends, I believe your betrayals were inadvertent. To find out if my heart is unruined. Father, are you out there or was your corpse accurate?

and then Tony showed us the lake where he had thrown some of his sadness last summer and it had dissolved like powder so he thought maybe the lake could take some of the radiant, aluminum kind he had been making lately. And it did. It was a perfect lake, none of the paint had chipped off, no bolts showing, the arms that Dante and Virgil would have to hack through not even breaking the surface. Mumbling Italian to itself, it had climbed down two wooden stairs back to the beach now that the rains were done. How strange to be water so close to the ocean yet the only other water you get to talk to comes from the sky. Maybe this is why it seems so willing to take on Tony’s sadness which sometimes corrodes his friends, which is really many different sadnesses, smaller and smaller, surrounded by more and more space, each a world and at its core an engine like a bee inside a lily, like buzzing inside the bee. It seems like nothing could change its color although we couldn’t tell what color it was, it kept changing. In the summer, Tony says he comes down early each day and there’s no one around so the lake barely says a thing when he dives in and once when his kitchen was on fire in Maine and he was asleep, the lake came and bit his hand, trying to drag him to safety and some nights in New Mexico, he can hear it howling, searching for him in the desert so we’re glad Tony has this lake and we promise to come back in August and swim with him across, maybe even race.

Avoid adjectives of scale. Dandelion broth instead of duck soup. Don’t even think you’ve seen a meadow, ever. The minor adjustments in our equations still indicate the universe is insane, when it laughs a silk dress comes out its mouth but we never put it on. Put it on. Cry often and while asleep. If it’s raw, forge it in fire. That’s not a mountain, that’s crumble. If it’s fire, swallow. The heart of a scarecrow isn’t geometrical. That’s not a diamond, it’s salt. That’s not the sky but it’s not your fault. My dragon may be your neurotoxin. Your electrocardiogram may be my fortune cookie. Once an angel has made an annunciation, it’s impossible to tell him he has the wrong address. Moonlight has its own befuddlements. The rest of us can wear the wolf mask if we want or look like reflections wandered off. Eventually armor, eventually sunk. You wanted love and expected what? A parachute? Morphine? A gold sticker star? The moment you were born— you have to trust others because you weren’t there. Ditto death. The strongest gift I was ever given was made of twigs. It didn’t matter which way it broke.

Every Wednesday when I went to the shared office before the class on the comma, etc., there was on the desk, among the notes from students aggrieved and belly-up and memos about lack of funding and the quixotic feasibility memos and labyrinthine parking memos and quizzes pecked by red ink and once orange peels, a claw hammer. There when I came and there when I left, it didn’t seem in anyone’s employ. There was no room left to hang anything. It already knew how to structure an argument. It already knew that it was all an illusion that everything hadn’t blown apart because of its proximity to oblivion, having so recently come from oblivion itself. Its epiphyses were already closed. It wasn’t my future that was about to break its wrist or my past that was god knows where. It looked used a number of times not entirely appropriately but its wing was clearly healed. Down the hall was someone with a glove instead of a right hand. A student came by looking for who? Hard to understand then hard to do. I didn’t think much of stealing it, having so many hammers at home. There when I came, there when I left. Ball peen, roofing, framing, sledge, one so small of probably only ornamental use. That was one of my gifts, finding hammers by sides of roads, in snow, inheriting, one given by a stranger for a jump in the rain. It cannot be refused, the hammer. You take the handle, test its balance then lift it over your head.

You shouldn’t have a heart attack in your 20s. 47 is the perfect time for a heart attack. Feeding stray shadows only attracts more shadows. Starve a fever, shatter a glass house. People often mistake thirst for hunger so first take a big slurp. A motorboat is wasted on me even though all summer the pool was, I didn’t get in it once. Not in it, not in it twice. A dollhouse certainly isn’t wasted on a mouse both in terms of habitation and rhyme. Always leave yourself time to get lost. 50 cattle are enough for a decent dowry but sometimes a larger gesture is called for like shouting across the Grand Canyon. Get used to nothing answering back. Always remember the great effects of the Tang poets, the meagerness of their wine, meagerness of writing supplies. Go ahead, drown in the moon’s puddle. Contusions are to be expected and a long wait in ICU under the muted TVs advertising miracle knives and spot removers. How wonderful to be made entirely of hammered steel! No one knows why Lee chose to divert his troops to Gettysburg but all agree it was the turning point of the Civil War. Your turining point may be lying crying on the floor. Get up! The perfect age for being buried alive in sand is 8 but jumping up 33, alluding to the resurrection, a powerful motif in Western art but then go look at the soup cans and crumpled fenders in the modern wing: what a relief. Nearly 80% of the denizens of the deep can produce their own light but up here, we make our own darkness.

My poor students, all I ask of them is to grow antennae, lie down with lava and rise with snow, grow tongues from their math assignments and no, Melissa, your mother won’t approve of the bioluminescent smear on your communion dress. The world fidgets in uneasy relationship to our statements about it nevertheless producing silver buds from ragged limbs like the luster in late Frank Sinatra songs. Finally, when I got off the sixth floor, I felt like I was walking out into the sky and aren’t we all pedestrians of air? Doesn’t it feel all wrong to turn our backs on the ocean? On an ant? On those Chagall windows you have to go through a gauntlet of ancient armor to get to? What was her name, that night nurse so deft her blood draws didn’t wake me up? Don’t get me wrong, I want to wake up. I want my old dog to show me all that wolf-light she hides inside even though she thinks I won’t understand, even though her vet and I conspire to keep her alive forever.

Imagine, not even or really ever tasting a peach until well over 50, not once sympathizing with Blake naked in his garden insisting on angels until getting off the table and coming home with my new heart. How absurd to still have a body in this rainbow-gored, crickety world and how ridiculous to be given one in the first place, to be an object like an orchid is an object, or a stone, so bruisable and plummeting, arms waving from the evening-ignited lake, heading singing in the furnace feral and sweet, tears that make the face grotesque, tears that make it pure. How easy it is now to get drunk on a single whiff like a hummingbird or ant, on the laughter of one woman and who knew how much I’d miss that inner light of snow now that I’m in Texas.

For Kenneth Koch You don't need a pony to connect you to the unseeable or an airplane to connect you to the sky. Necessary it is to love to live and there are many manuals but in all important ways one is on one's own. You need not cut off your hand. No need to eat a bouquet. Your head becomes a peach pit. Your tongue a honeycomb. Necessary it is to live to love, to charge into the burning tower then charge back out and necessary it is to die. Even for the trees, even for the pony connecting you to what can't be grasped. The injured gazelle falls behind the herd. One last wild enjambment. Because of the sores in his mouth, the great poet struggles with a dumpling. His work has enlarged the world but the world is about to stop including him. He is the tower the world runs out of. When something becomes ash, there's nothing you can do to turn it back. About this, even diamonds do not lie.

To always be in motion there is no choice even for the mountain and its frigid cousins floating on the oceans that even sluggish seethe and moan and laugh out loud at their own jokes. How "like the human heart" can be said of pert near everything, pint of fizz, punching bag because all moves: the mouse, the house, the pelt of moon corresponding to the seas (see above) (now get back here) of mood, sadness heaving kelp at the sunken city's face, gladness somersaulting from the eaves like a kid's drawing of a snowflake. No matter how stalled I seem, some crank in me tightens the whirly-spring each time I see your face so thank you for aiming it my way, all this flashing like polished brass, lightning, powder, step on the gas, whoosh we're halfway through our lives, fishmarkets flying by, Connecticut, glut then scarcity, hurried haircuts, smell of pencils sharpened, striving, falling short, surviving because we ducked or somehow got some shut-eye even though inside the hotel wall loud leaks. I love to watch the youthful flush drub your cheeks in your galloping dream. Maybe even death will be replenishment. Who knows? Who has the time, let's go, the unknown's display of emeralds closes in an hour, the fireworks' formula has changed, will we ever see that tangerine blue again, factory boarded up then turned into bowling lanes.

What will be served for our reception in the devastation? Finger food, of course and white wine, something printed on the napkins. We were not children together but we are now. Every bird knows only two notes constantly rearranged. That’s called forever so we wear pajamas to the practice funeral, buckeroos to the end. We make paper hats of headlines and float them away. My home made of smoke, tiny spider made of punctuation, my favorite poem is cinder scratched into a sidewalk. My friend’s becoming the simplest man, he sees a lesson in everything, in missing his train, in his son hollering from the first branch, Dad, guess where I am. I was with him for my first magpies, governmental and acting like hell. And the new nickel with Washington hard to recognize. We’d driven by a Rabbit flattened by an upset truck, jars of Miracle Whip broken over the toll road in heavy snow. We watched an old lady eat a hot dog in a bun with a knife and fork. A few emeralds winged off a fruit leaf. What happens when your head splits open and the bird flies out, its two notes deranged? You got better, I got better, wildflowers rimmed the crater, glitter glitter glitter. We knew someone whose father died then we knew ourselves. Astronomer, gladiator, thief, a tombstone salesman. All our vacations went to the sea that breathed two times a day without a machine. We got in trouble with a raft doing what we promised not to. Further out to be brought further back. There’s my friend in his squashed hat trying to determine if a dot is a living thing and do no harm. He’s having trouble remembering street names but there’s still plenty of Thoreau. All that a human is made of is gold, very very little gold.