Dean Young

The mountain thinks it’s the same without you but it’s wrong. Maybe the same stars whisking themselves further off, the darker the brighter, same chamomile crushed underfoot but the little, wiry dog we loved has preceded us into paradise, not that I expect to join her even though my own crappy heart’s worse, running’s out but I may be finally learning how to sit in a chair. I still don’t know what to call the good morning bird although whatever word’d be no truer than manzanita. I think namelessness has a crush on me, on how clean I keep my room, the usual stunned ruckus of wake up. But it’s a different moon, different woman on the hotel balcony yet the same kinda scary, vacant stare, caryatid foreseeing what? Before turning back to the customary, immaculate vacation squalor inside. The cash machine still says “enter to exit” but there’s more water in the creek than I’ve ever seen, the brighter the darker, in that first dream there was none.

Because we are so stupid, the prizes in Cracker Jacks are now paper so they can be swallowed, ladders spackled with warnings. No getting within a hundred feet of Stonehenge because everyone wants to hack off a souvenir and the way home is clogged to one lane so whoever wants to can stare into a pothole until coming up with a grievance. I’d vote the greatest accomplishment of mankind is the pickle spear. God created paradise to tell us Get out! which is why we probably created God who doesn’t much like being created by ilk like us. No wonder it’s pediatrics every morning and toxicology by happy hour. Is it all in the mind, the dirty, dirty mind? Maybe God tried to turn you into a garbage can so you could be lifted by the truck’s hydraulic arms and banged empty. Maybe a snow cone so you could be sticky-sweet and dropped. Maybe a genital-faced bivalve to be dashed with Tabasco and eaten whole or, to his glory, produce a pearl.

More than the beetles turned russet, sunset, dragging their shield, more than the crickets who think it’s evening all afternoon, it’s the bees I love this time of year. Sated, maybe drunk, who’ve lapped at the hips of too many flowers for one summer but still must go on hunting, one secret closing, another ensuing, picking lock after lock, rapping the glass, getting stuck in a puddle of dish soap, almost winter, almost dark, reading far past the last paragraph into the back blank page, acknowledgments, and history of type. I think when my head finally cracks out will come one of those ravening scouts autumnal with hunger beyond any sipping, swallowing, beyond the hive’s teeming factory’s needs. I think maybe then, when I’m dying like a bug in a puddle of dish soap, I’ll be relieved, my wings wet capes and not working, antennae slicked back and not working, eye that sees the ruby above going out, eye that sees the ruby within getting brighter as I drag myself to a tomato ripening on the window sill, reddest, softest island of my last planet, last aureola, stinger waving and useless. I’ll wait then, while air from the north rushes gulf air, a tree indicating wildly, each leaf woke in orange outcry. It won’t be suffering, exactly. Rain coming, then gone, a chill that means all my barbarous kind are alone and perishing, our unrecognizable young buried and waiting, bodies of fire becoming bodies of air. I don’t think there’s any way to prepare.

That dusty bubble gum, once ubiquitous as starlings, is no more, my love. Whistling dinosaurs now populate only animation studios, the furious actions of angels causing their breasts to flop out in mannerist frescos flake away as sleet holds us in its teeth. And the bus-station's old urinals go under the grindstone and the youthful spelunkers graduate into the wrinkle-causing sun. The sea seemingly a constant to the naked eye is one long goodbye, perpetually the tide recedes, beaches dotted with debris. Unto each is given a finite number of addresses, ditties to dart the heart to its moments of sorrow and swoon. The sword's hilt glints, the daffodils bow down, all is temporary as a perfect haircut, a kitten in the lap, yet sitting here with you, my darling, waiting for a tuna melt and side of slaw seems all eternity I'll ever need and all eternity needs of me.

Sometimes I think about climbing a telephone pole but then what? Telephone poles now have almost nothing to do with telephones but I liked how a curly cord went into the receiver then a sturdier black wire went into the wall through the wall out to a pole then miles and miles of wire pole wire pole sometimes underground underwater to whomever you needed who’d dry her hands thinking Gosh now what or Thank heavens or Oh no then say Hello as a question or a lie then the intimate negotiations and sorry confessions and flat jokes would take word form from excited electrons moving through the wire and sometimes a cowboy would suddenly gallop to town through dust and cactus Yup a storm’s a-coming to call someone but the fates always intend so the cowboy must listen for the rest of his days to the phone make a funny insect-performing-Beckett sound until the operator comes on and says, Sorry but that calling area's been hit by the blast and the cowboy thinks, What blast? What blast? riding off into the moonlessly blue chaparral.

How could I not? Have seen a man walk up to a piano and both survive. Have turned the exterminator away. Seen lipstick on a wine glass not shatter the wine. Seen rainbows in puddles. Been recognized by stray dogs. I believe reality is approximately 65% if. All rivers are full of sky. Waterfalls are in the mind. We all come from slime. Even alpacas. I believe we’re surrounded by crystals. Not just Alexander Vvedensky. Maybe dysentery, maybe a guard’s bullet did him in. Nonetheless. Nevertheless I believe there are many kingdoms left. The Declaration of Independence was written with a feather. A single gem has throbbed in my chest my whole life even though even though this is my second heart. Because the first failed, such was its opportunity. Was cut out in pieces and incinerated. I asked. And so was denied the chance to regard my own heart in a jar. Strange tangled imp. Wee sleekit in red brambles. You know what it feels like to hold a burning piece of paper, maybe even trying to read it as the flames get close to your fingers until all you’re holding is a curl of ash by its white ear tip yet the words still hover in the air? That’s how I feel now.

This time I’m not going to say a thing about deity. It’s not the blizzard, it’s three days after. Trinkle from thawing roofs, ruined crocus pronging through. Ruin, I promise, won’t be mentioned again. Trees, sure, still begging in the road, split to the bole but this isn’t about the chainsaw. A pruning saw will have to do. The puppets aren’t hanging themselves in each other’s strings. Everyone’s easily identifiable beneath the funny mask. Somewhere in Oregon, Mary has another month to go, she’s comfortable in any position for thirty-five seconds. Lulu, we know you’re in there but no one’s blaming you for reluctance to come out. Poetry is the grinding of a multiplicity throwing off sparks, wrote Artaud and look what that got him: toothlessness and shock therapy. Your dad, who has the worst teeth of anyone I know, once ordered eggplant in a steakhouse. Do not order eggplant in a steakhouse turned out to be more than aphoristicly true. Do not spend a lot of time in an asylum writing cruel poems if you can help it, one Artaud is enough. In Kandinsky’s Blue 2, there’s a shape in two rows of shapes that seems okay although to the right’s a capsized canoe full of mathematicians, to the left a bow about to launch the killer astrolabe. By what manner is the soul joined to the body? How about climbing a ladder of fire? No thanks. On TV, a rhino’s lying in some red dust, munching a thorn. You wouldn’t think he could ejaculate for half an hour straight, but you’d be wrong. See that cloud, it might weigh 10,000 pounds which is about average for a cloud. Happy birthday, happy birthday to you. Tony says Mary is always writing about the sacred. Talcum powder, binoculars, this decimated planet. I know, a promise has been made but Tony’s been sick for years and no one knows with what. Flax oil, bark tinctures, corticosteroids. He’s not exactly someone you’d trust to drive your car, but still. Something awful’s coming, isn’t it? Would it help if I said Amen?