Dean Young

Skipping the Reception

I don't really want to meet Burkard.
Just because I like his books.
He's probably disappointing in person.
I know I am. In person you have to commit
to what comes fumping out of your mouth
like popped ketchup. John suggests
go bowling so as not to say anything.
I know a woman who takes off her blouse.
All good ideas. Even with old friends,
you end up in used bookstores inspecting
old typewriters sacrificed to decoration.
Making your way across the parking-lot
ice. We are not monkeys! Throw something
down hard enough, you discover its laws.
We are not brains in big pyrex jars
connected to the generators running
everything although we try to talk like it.
The sound of the crash barely reaches us
so it sounds like someone else's problem.
Precious moments of life ebbing away.
What a pathetic thing to say. How
did we get on this subject? Do you
have a cat? Is this shirt ugly? What
are those marks on your arm? I don't think
my voice will ever emerge from the center
of my chest. Here's your fire extinguisher,
welcome to the glacier.

Facet

For weeks, I've gone unbroken
but not unpunished by the quiet
of zero degrees which is worse than
the quiet of twenty when at least
you can't hear the stars wheeze.
I can't make it any clearer than that
and stay drunk. A crash course
in the afterlife where I still walk
beside you but unable to touch your hair.
It worries me I could no longer care
or only in a detached way like a monk
for a scorpion.

Elegy on a Toy Piano

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 die
if you are a living thing
which you have no choice about.

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 grass, 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.

Sources of the Delaware

I love you he said but saying it took twenty years
so it was like listening to mountains grow.
I love you she says fifty times into a balloon
then releases the balloon into a room
whose volume she calculated to fit
the breath it would take to read
the complete works of Charlotte Bronte aloud.
Someone else pours green dust into the entryway
and puts rice paper on the floor. The door
is painted black. On the clothesline
shirttails snap above the berserk daffodils.
Hoagland says you've got to plunge the sword
into the charging bull. You've got
to sew yourself into a suit of light.
For the vacuum tube, it's easy,
just heat the metal to incandescence
and all that dark energy becomes radiance.
A kind of hatching, syntactic and full of buzz.
No contraindications, no laws forbidding
buying gin on Sundays. Not if you're pregnant,
if you're operating heavy machinery because
who isn't towing the scuttled tonnage
of some self? Sometimes just rubbing
her feet is enough. Just putting out
a new cake of soap. Sure, the contents
are under pressure and everyone knows
that last step was never intended to bear
any weight but isn't that why we're standing there?
Ripples in her hair, I love you she hollers
over the propellers. Yellow scarf in mist.
When I planted all those daffodils,
I didn't know I was planting them
in my own chest. Play irretrievably
with the lid closed, Satie wrote on the score.
But Hoagland says he's sick of opening
the door each morning not on diamonds
but piles of coal, and he's sick of being
responsible for the eons of pressure needed
and the sea is sick of being responsible
for the rain, and the river is sick of the sea.
So the people who need the river
to float waste to New Jersey
throw in antidepressants. So the river
is still sick but nervous now too,
its legs keep thrashing out involuntarily,
flooding going concerns, keeping the president
awake. So the people throw in beta-blockers
to make it sleep which it does, sort of,
dreaming it's a snake again but this time
with fifty heads belching ammonia
which is nothing like the dreams it once had
of children splashing in the blue of its eyes.
So the president gets on the airways
with positive vectors and vows
to give every child a computer
but all this time, behind the podium,
his penis is shouting, Put me in, Coach,
I can be the river! So I love you say
the flashbulbs but then the captions
say something else. I love you says
the hammer to the nail. I love Tamescha
someone sprays across the For Sale sign.
So I tell Hoagland it's a fucked-up ruined
world in such palatial detail, he's stuck
for hours on the phone. Look at those crows,
they think they're in on the joke and
they don't love a thing. They think
they have to be that black to keep
all their radiance inside. I love you
the man says as his mother dies
so now nothing ties him to the earth,
not fistfuls of dirt, not the silly songs
he remembers singing as a child.
I love you I say meaning lend me twenty bucks.

Gray Matter

Some part of me is disappointed
when the execution’s stayed.
I say I want blue water
but I want everything muddy.
Maniacs trained as mechanics,
nymphs dashing through corporate plazas
like correction tape. Church towers—
what a good hiding place
for a slaughterhouse.
At the end of 4,000 years,
the scientists say into the cameras,
We’ve only been able to discover
15 ounces of decency, maybe more
in the future if the money keeps coming.
They turn back through the door
to the basement where the wine’s kept cold
and children send each other on dares.
There are parts of the human brain
even carp spit out.

Lives of the Veterans

Byzantium was once a city on the Bosporus
famous for talking fountains
World War I made evaporate.
At one time, it was the saddest thing,
men limped around London and Berlin
with shards of Byzantium sticking out their movements.
Some came back with idiotic ditties
trapped in their hippocampus, others
strolled around for hours in wet dresses,
fleeing at the lowest possible speeds.
This was before television so folks
just looked into the fire and said
what they saw for entertainment.
Lots saw Hell.
Did they have it better than us?
When a woman smoked, it was like
she was naked so that must have been fun.
Certainly they were accustomed
to death having done so much of it.
Their doctors spent all their time
figuring out what was killing you
then killing you with something else.
No need for a lawyer.
The rat was huge.
Into the breach stiff upper lip was huge.
When a doughboy missed his sweetheart,
he couldn't just write,
I miss your muffin,
because of the censors. Apollo,
who ate the most pussy of al the ancient gods,
was out. The Holy Ghost was in.
Everyone knew where the Holy Ghost stood on cunnilingus
even though He was ineffable.
The invention of the telephone, machine gun, typewriter,
great strides in plastic surgery
before there was even plastic.
Funny thing is,
while just about everything was blown up,
nothing much changed,
so in 20 years they'd need bigger bombs.

Centrifuge

It might have been midnight when last we talked
and now I've got this poem that keeps flying
apart which accounts under these xenophobic stars
for all force: gravity, magnetism wind, the ling-

ering of a kiss, a judo throw although
there's yet to be a single formula for it.
Save us from single formulas. One room
smells like ash, another smells like fruitcake.

One cardinal sits on a branch, another under.
You've got to be a bird to understand any of this,
feathery and hollow-boned. You've got to be
a claims adjuster staring at a storm. You've

got to be entered by a shower of gold coins.
On the back of a Brazilian book of poems,
the translator looks haggard as if she's chased
a mule cart into another century, the twentieth,

and suddenly she's feeble in Pittsburgh in her
bunny furs. Imagine, suddenly Pittsburgh,
the handful of dust thrown up for the sun's
haughty inspection, laughing its molecular

laugh, hungry again, dazzling again it its
stained satin pajamas like the memory of lost
love. I think we were walking though some woods
towards more to drink, up ahead the future

gesticulating wildly like a beggar who'd
scare us out of money, the future threatening
to isolate us like glum geniuses prowling
record stores, not getting a lot done,

mistaken for clerks with gum on our shoes. I'm
trying not to panic. I'm trying to find the center,
drive a nail through it like a mercy killing. I'm
letting myself be thrown around while Come at me

says the day to the night. Come at me says
the cloud to the moon dragging its terrible noose.
Come at me says L so she can show me what she's learned
in martial arts and now some part of me can't or

won't get up, the ground husky with thaw, fall's
idiot nomenclature garbled in the bramble. I'm
letting my back get soaked. I'm turning into wine.
I'm a broken kore, lips barely parted saying

what? I know suffering does not make us beautiful,
it makes us disappear like wearing black shirts
at midnight, like lying on the spinning earth
crying, Momma, Momma.

Multi-Tasking

Maybe I'm a zebra.
My wings are rudimentary
but a node in my noggin allows me
to get drunk with the least provocation.
Red skirt hic bubble wrap hic
accoutrements of an obscure practique.
Only half of me disappears at night,
the half that doesn't disappear in snow
and thus I am able to discourse with death
with a straight face.
Much fisticuffs in the penatralium.
Much sexual argon in the manic greenhouse.
I'm a walking talking eclipse
so identity theft doesn't worry me much.
Feeding on honeycomb through chicken wire,
thus I serve out my bondage.
The solution to life is death
yet the question keeps getting asked
and not twice the same.
I never wanted to hurt anyone.
Well, almost.
Is this your hatchet?
A moon puts its beak in my eye,
an orchid forwards my mail.
Tangential to the chewy nougat, the caramel.
It's one thing after another for the zebra:
betrayals in the high grass, simpleton suicides,
vasodilators ruining a good stampede.
When you go to my grave, you go to the wrong place.
The color of saying hello not knowing to whom,
the shooting star turned into static,
I thought you couldn't burn a river,
I thought the worst grief was no grief at all.
Remember honking in the tunnel?
A small abyss yet everyone fits.
But I digress.
My god is a zebra after all,
imparting high-speed reversals to the swing shift.
Our camouflage works best
galloping en masse in discotheques.
We are very gentle with our young.

from "The Living Hand

It's not only the word roses
lurking inside neurosis or the fact
that most of my formal education
occurred in the midwest, so too
my summer job inhaling industrial
reactants should be considered.
Its an unstable world, babe.
Always an inner avalanche
as they say in receiving.
I'm sure if I'd gotten a shot
of Karl instead of Zeppo Marx
in utero, things would have turned out
differently. Instead, my mother
went right on eating lobster.
But where were we? . . .

My Work Among the Insects

The body of the lingerneedle is filled
with hemolymph unconstricted except
for a single dorsal vessel. A ventral
diaphragm bathes the organs of the head,

undulations drawing the fluid back through
tiny holes called ostia aided by the movement
of a Napoleon within each abdominal segment
pacing his Elba exile, muttering la Russie

la Russie as the snow squeaks beneath
his boots. All through the night
the temperature drops but no one
knows where the lingerneedle goes.

Yet it emerges each spring like
a baseball team. Gertrude Stein
may have been referring to this when
she wrote, A hurried heaving is a quartz

confinement, although what we normally think of
as referring is brought into question by her work.
A hive of white suching. At the time
of her death, she owned many valuable

paintings renowned for ugliness.
Gertrude Stein grew up in Oakland
but an Oakland as we know it not. No
plastic bags snagged in the trees. Semi-

automatics had yet to reach the fifth grade.
A person could stand in a field, naked
and singing. Sure, there was blood but
there were rags for wiping up the blood.

Deciduous trees, often confused by California
dimes, just bloom whenthehellever like how
people have sex in French movies. Here,
during the cool evenings and hot mid-days,

the mild winters and resistive texts,
the lingerneedle thrives. Upon the ruddy
live oak leaves appears its first instar,
spit-like but changing shortly to a messy lace

erupting into many-legged, heavy-winged
adults that want only to mate. Often in July,
one finds them collapsed in the tub, unable
to gain purchase on the porcelain that seems

to attract them mightily. It is best not
to make everything a metaphor of one's own life
but many have pressed themselves against cool
and smooth, in love and doomed. Truly

the earth hurtles through the cosmos at
an alarming rate. Recent research suggests
a gummy discharge of the mating pair

has promise as an anti-coagulant. Please,
more money is needed. The sun sets. The air
turns chilly and full of jasmine.

Bay Arena

When I worked in the bookstore in Berkeley,
upstairs some woman would sing, alluring
as lava, husky as tar, sometimes it'd be
a whole band driving us a little crazy
downstairs because even good music
heard through a ceiling gets nerve-wracking,
a constant strain to make a whole of it,
catch the lyrics slurred by plumbing prattle
and footfall like you're getting complicated
directions over a bad connection or trying
to figure out just why it is you can't
divide by zero. But I'd say to Michelle
who did the ordering and sometimes would
ask me should she order The Wasps of
Puerto Rico, 55 bucks a shot, and I'd say
No way, it'll rot on the shelf like
everything else in Latin America
what with the jungle, poverty, and burn off,
so she'd order three and they'd sell
immediately. More stuff to mess up the store.
I hated customers, how they charged in, tusks
dismantling the alphabet, ranting, raving
in the thick accents of demand, something
about Puerto Rico, something about wasps
as if I was wired individually to each book
and in back, they're stuffing Treasuries
of Haiku in their pants, ripping covers off,
who knows, twice I found empty flaps, volumes
by Ricoeur who said I think, Everything is
profoundly cracked, although it might have been
an epigraph he used by someone else because
that's all I ever got to read, an education
of pithy, lost snippets, always trying to do
a million things at once, our filing system
like something out of Kafka, smudgy
index cards organized by press, don't mix up
a slash with a check, so I'd have to explain
and search through Books in Print because they'd
forgotten their glasses but really they were
people looking for books who couldn't read!
So I'd say to Michelle in the quiet hour
between 3 and 3:15, Man, that girl can sing,
and she'd just uh-huh because she too lived
upstairs and even Pavarotti would get sickening,
all that passion coming through a wall when
you just want to eat your green beans, watch
a little TV. I mean all music verges on pure
irritation, noise, wearying, weary. Michelle
feeding her turtle ripped up lettuce. Turtle
called Myrtle of course who it was okay
to bring to work, at least she wasn't breast-
feeding at the front desk the way L did who
was finally fired not only for not doing a thing
but fouling up everyone else. I mean there you are,
trying to calm a customer and she opens her blouse,
ladles out this enormous breast, it had a tendency
to knock out everything from anyone's head.
Eternally nonplussed creature, I mean this
turtle who I liked all right but how close
can you get to a turtle? It pulls its
head in, pushes it out, blinks--mostly
I worried about stepping on it then
some guy comes in waving a jar of Prego,
screaming about the New Deal and, This is it,
I think, I will die in Berkeley in a splatter
of extra thick sauce, a corona of glass
spread out like my incomplete poems,
my brains spilled out like sensibility
as outside the street starts percolating
in the gelling light. Soon the protesters
will be throwing rocks at the gym because
a volleyball court's finally gone into
People's Park like the university's been
threatening to do through the ages of Aquarius
and later cops shooting wooden pegs but
that afternoon I'm getting my falafel
lunch at the caboose on Bancroft from
the guy who always asks me how I'm managing
and tells me how he's sleeping, not too
good, who could these days, and I say Amen,
handing over my 2.25, giving this Arab
a more mixed message than I intend and
the guy in the tutu and evening gloves,
the Love-Hate man with rouge in his beard
is matching the blustering fundamentalist
syllable by syllable: for every hell a bell,
every damnation a dalmatian, shadow for
shadow, wagging Bible against wagging
New Age Singles, satori, samsara, and then
I hear her like smoke my mother blew in
my ear when I had an earache and I strain
against what lashes me to the mast. We are
stardust, we are golden, and there she is.
She must weigh 300 pounds, head like a glop
of Playdoh dropped on a mountain of smoldering
hams, feet immense puddles in those specially
designed fat shoes that lace on both sides
and that voice like a swan hatching from
a putrid egg and people tossing change
into a tambourine, arrhythmic accompaniment
to the drummer who closes his eyes,
the guitarist who closes his eyes,
the music passing through us all like
some frail filament driven through a pole
during a hurricane, through all our barriers
of tissue toward outer space, the rapacious
gardens of stars from which we've fallen,
shuddering cores of cinder, whirlwinds of ash.

White Crane

I don't need to know any more about death
from the Japanese beetles
infesting the roses and plum
no matter what my neighbor sprays
in orange rubber gloves.
You can almost watch them writhe and wither,
pale and fall like party napkins
blown from a table just as light fades,
and the friends,
as often happens when light fades,
talk of something painful, glacial, pericardial,
and the napkins blow into the long grass.
When Basho writes of the long grass,
I don't need to know it has to do with death,
the characters reddish-brown and dim,
shadows of a rusted sword, an hour hand.
Imagine crossing mountains in summer snow
like Basho, all you own
on your back: brushes, robe,
the small gifts given in parting it's bad luck to leave behind.
I don't want to know what it's like to die on a rose,
sunk in perfume and fumes,
clutching,
to die in summer with everything off its knees,
daisies scattered like eyesight by the fence,
gladiolas open and fallen in mud,
weighed down with opening and breeze.
I wonder what your thoughts were, Father,
after they took your glasses and teeth,
all of us bunched around you like clouds
knocked loose of their moorings,
the white bird lying over you,
its beak down your throat.
Rain, heartbeats of rain.

Thrown as if Fierce & Wild

You don’t have a clue, says the power drill
to the canoe hanging from the rafters.
Is life a contest everything plays
by different rules for different prizes?
You’re really worthless, aren’t you?
barks the cherry tree covered with eponymous
fruit to the wagon lying on its side.
Unfair! Wasn’t that wagon not two days ago
leading the parade, the puppy refusing
to wear her hat? Can’t you just leave me
alone? says the big picture of Marilyn
Monroe behind her nonreflective glass.
Is the universe infinity in ruckus
and wrack? The third grader loose
in dishwares, the geo-tech
weeping on the beach. Mine, mine,
says the squirrel to the transformer,
unclear on the capacities of electricity.
String of Christmas lights tangled with
extension cords, can’t you work things out?
The young couple takes a step toward the altar,
increasing the magnetic force that sends
ex-lovers whirling off into nether nebulae
but attracting mothers-in-law. In one wing,
the oxygen mask taken from the famous writer
of terza rema glee while in another
an infant arrives, loudly disappointed
to have to do everything now himself,
no longer able to breathe under water.
Will we never see our dead friends again?
A motorcycle roars on the terrible screw
of the parking structure, lava
heaves itself into the frigid strait.

from Skid

First there was a raffle conducted by silhouettes
then some gaga clangor and the deflection
of not getting what I wanted probably never.
I was trying to write The Indomitability
of the Human Spirit to impress you but
it kept coming out The Undomesticated
Human Spigot, a blowhard stoned soap opera.
I could't understand anything and you
were my teacher. The rain bounced off
the upturned canoes by the man-made lake
and out of the man-made water small bodies
propelled themselves into the nevertheless air.

This I could not do.

I had been worn out by a lasagna.
A train had run through my almanac.
I had gone directly to the small screen.
It was only a couple times I leaned from the window
in that gorilla mask yet of all I have accomplished
and delayed, my deeds in the outback, cradling
the dying wombats, cataloging every wrong
ever done to me with innovative
cross-references, this is what I'm remembered for:
leaning from a window in a gorilla mask.

It's frustrating,
like hiding stolen jewelry in tubs of lard.
Sure, it works but have you ever tried
to get grease off a brooch?
Or geese out of a coach for that matter.
They have to be heavily sedated
and it's weeks before they can even float right.

Action Figuring

Maybe this is a guy thing but I find
pizza almost completely sustaining.
One does not have meals, one has pizza
and thus is able to work unimpeded
upon one's theories. One gunman,
definitely one gunman. Such simplicity,
however, can lead to murderous boredom.
In the last 3 days, I have rented 8 videos,
have seen explode: helicopters, satellites,
a bridge, flesh-eating puppets, heads,
hands, the White House, unclassifiable
weaponry, flora and fauna of distant worlds
and still within me some fuse burns on.
Love is not everything yet without it
one explosion is much like any other.
Monday, mine own true saboteur returns
to complicate my diet and napping
deliciously although there will be infinitely
more dishes, more fuzz. Sex isn't
everything but inside each of us is
a sort of timer, a sort of spring.
My one and only detonator comes with
many small accessories which, if she was
an army man, would be: grenades, bazookas,
flame-throwers, all in danger of being
sucked up a vacuum cleaner hose. I believe
everyone should have the opportunity
to sift through dust and hair and find
an emerald. On the whole, I am in favor
of the sense that "things are more complicated
than one at first thought" which makes one
nervous often in a good, young-in
the-fingertips way. You could be washing
your car, you could be gleaning naught
from the printed media while inside
is this flying then, gee, how did all
this fruit salad get here? But wait!
Can we ever be sure it is fruit salad
and not some sort of bomb? One gazes into
the other's eyes and sees the reflection
of one's regrettable nose but more importantly
a darkness that is seeing depth itself
unless one uses ophthalmological equipment
and then examines the retina and vascularization
and vitreous humor which in composition
is very akin to amniotic fluid. I can't remember
swimming without remembering almost drowning.
Either one is about to be frightened to death
or this is prelude to a kiss.

A Poem by Dean Young

Don't think for one fucking instant
that I don't have a broken heart.
The man in briefs in an infinite sea
believes there is no subconscious,
nor is he aware that tempora exists.
Don't think I have not eaten
in the most beautiful Chinese restaurant
in the world. Don't think I have not written
on the walls of my bathtub.
Don't think I haven't poisoned a snail.
Don't think I haven't ignited
the sulfur of the fortune teller.
Of course I have written a poem by Dean Young!
More than once I have written a poem by Dean Young.
More than once I have left them by your gate.
More than once I have stuffed the euycalyptus leaves
in your mouth. More than once I have lived,
more than once I have died because of it.
I love you. This remarkable statement
has appeared on earth to substantiate the clams.
Perhaps now we can reach an agreement in the Himalayas,
returning shortly thereafter as gods, the kind kind
largely ignored by larger and more sensitive organisms.
Don't think I wasn't shocked when
you were a traffic signal
and I a woodpecker.

Even Funnier Looking Now

If someone had asked me then,
Do you suffer from the umbrage of dawn's
dark race horses, is your heart a prisoner
of raindrops? Hell yes! I would have said
or No way! Never would I have said,
What could you possibly be talking about?
I had just gotten to the twentieth century
like a leftover girder from the Eiffel Tower.
My Indian name was Pressure-Per-Square-Inch.
I knew I was made of glass but I didn't
yet know what glass was made of: hot sand
inside me like pee going all the wrong
directions, probably into my heart
which I knew was made of gold foil
glued to dust. It was you I loved,
only you but you kept changing
into different people which made
kissing your mouth very exciting.
Of the birds, I loved the crows best,
sitting on their lawn chairs, ranting
about their past campaigns, the broken
supply lines, the traitors. Some had bodies
completely covered with feathers like me,
some were almost invisible like you.
And of the rivers, I loved the Susquehanna,
how each spring it would bring home a boy
who didn't listen disguised as a sack of mud.
Everyone knew if you were strong enough
and swam fast and deep enough, you'd reach
another city but no one was ever strong enough.
Along the banks: the visceral honeysuckle.
That was the summer we tanned on the roof
reading the Russians. You told me
you broke up with your boyfriend I lost count.
Dusky, pellucid and grave.
In the Chekhov story, nothing happened but
a new form of misery was nonetheless delineated.
Accidentally, I first touched your breast.
Rowboat, I tried to think of rhymes for rowboat.
And sequins and yellow and two-by-fours.
In one of your parents' bathrooms,
the handles were silver dolphins.
My ears were purple.
The crayons melted in the sun,
that was one way. Another was to tear things up
and tape them together wrong.
That was the summer I lived in the attic
and the punk band never practiced below.
Your breasts were meteors, never meteorites.
There was something wrong with my tongue.
There was my famous use of humor
that Jordan said was the avoidance of emotion.
I couldn't hold on to a nickel.
There was that pitcher on the mound,
older, facing his former team. He had lost
some of his stuff but made up for it with
cerebrum. Your breasts were never rusty.
Your breasts reflected the seeming-so.
Your mouth I wanted my mouth over,
your eyes my eyes into,
into your Monday afternoons I would try to cram
my Sunday nights, into your anthropology paper
I wanted to put my theories,
your apartment I would put my records in
and never get them back.
Here, you said: another baby avocado tree.
You threw your shoe. I broke
the refrigerator and the fossil fish.
I broke my shoulder blade.
I tried to make jambalaya.
To relax the organism, the cookbook said,
pound with a mallet on the head or shell.
Your friends all thought you were crazy.
My friends all thought I was crazy.
The names of Aztec gods were on one page,
serotonin uptake inhibitors on the other.
You fell in the street carrying a pumpkin.
I walked home alone in the snow.
I broke my hand.
Your light meter was in my glove box.

Lives of the Noncombatants

Poor Lorca, all those butterflies
in his bulletholes and there's only
one lousy stranger to throw dirt on him.
When the Falange threatened to set fire
to his home, the stranger volunteered
to save his children, each shovelful
doesn't fall on a daughter, each clod bouncing
in an open eye unearths a son.
There's a song that can't be translated.
The stars in it make no sense
but are very bright. We knock
at the window, we knock at the wind.
God shoots up her hand then pulls it back,
the question's not what she thought
was being asked. We knock at the door,
the ceiling, the floor, the century.

Poor Lorca, what a sissy, his whole life
he knew this was coming and still
he looks like an idiot, suddenly
he stops defanging the piano in his underwear
and gets all morbid, embarrasssing the diplomats.
He asks his parents for more money
for a silver pant leg, wristwatches
to fill a fishbowl and then he turns around
and puts tar in his hair. His stage directions
call for a rain of stiff white gloves.
You know what it's like to be wakened
by dogs, don't you? What it's like
to drop a couple thousand feet?
You know what a shovel is, don't you?
The only way we can withstand his berries
is by boiling them in an iron pot
then straining the mush through a cloth
and throwing away what comes through
and throwing away what's left then
wrapping the cloth around our heads
and even then our dreams will almost kill us.

Shamanism 101

Like everyone, I wanted my animal
to be the hawk.

I thought I wanted the strength
to eat the eyes first then tear
into the fuse box of the chest
and soar away.

I needed help because I still
cowered under the shadow of my father,
a man who inspected picture tubes
five out of seven nights,

who woke to breakfast on burnt roast
except the two weeks he'd sleep
on a Jersey beach and throw me
into the gasoline-sheened waves.
I loved him dying indebted
not knowing to what,

thinking his pension would be enough,
released not knowing from what,
gumming at something I was afraid
to get close enough to hear, afraid
of what I was co-signing. So maybe

the elephant. The elephant knows
when one of its own is suffering
up to six miles away. Charges across
the desert cognizant of the futility.
How can I be forgiven when I don't know
what I need forgiving for? Sometimes

the urges are too extreme: to slap
on the brakes and scream, to bite the haunch
of some passing perfume, so maybe my animal
is the tiger. Or shark.

Or centipede.

But I know I'm smaller than that,
filling notebooks with clumsy versions
of one plaint, one phenomenal call,

clamoring over a crumb that I think
is the world, baffled by the splotch
of one of my own crushed kind,
almost sweet, a sort of tar,
following a trail of one or two molecules,

leaving a trail
of one or two molecules.

Peach Farm

I felt pretty stupid in brown pants,
brown jacket, shirt, shoes and tie
at the peach farm. I cast them off!
The young peaches clung to the limbs
like sag-resistent muscles.
It's a good place to have a pony. Ditto
a heartbeat, something long, a Spanish-
English dictionary and lots of water
to remove stickiness. Bees are encouraged,
so too worms in the soil and every evening,
bats. Quadratic equations, not so much so.
Only an old dog is buried there.
I can't find the anvil
but then "Go find the anvil"
turns out to be some kind of joke
at the peach farm. The owner started paying
for the peach farm by selling a motorcycle
then selling peaches. Walking through the trees—
how different from looking for a Ph.D.
Yet also not. One good thing about
being unable to sit beside you
is seeing the back of your head in the leaves.
How far we are from kissing
our damage deposit goodbye.

Ode to Hangover       click here to hear Young read this poem

Hangover, you drive me into the yard
to dig holes as a way of working through you
as one might work through a sorry childhood
by riding the forbidden amusement park rides
as a grown-up until puking. Alas, I feel like
something spit out by a duck, a duck
other ducks are ashamed of when I only
tried to protect myself by projecting myself
on hilarity's big screen at the party
where one nitwit reminisced about the 39¢
a pound chicken of his youth and another said,
Don't go to Italy in June, no one goes to Italy in June.
Protect myself from boring advice,
from the boring past and the boring present
at the expense of an unnauseating future:
now. But look at these newly-socketed lilacs!
Without you, Hangover, they would still be
trapped in their buckets and not become
the opposite of vomit just as you, Hangover,
are the opposite of Orgasm. Certainly
you go on too long and in your grip
one thinks, How to have you never again?
whereas Orgasm lasts too short some seconds
and immediately one plots to repeat her.
After her I could eat a car but here's
a pineapple/clam pizza and Chinese milkshake
yum but Hangover, you make me aspire
to a saltine. Both of you need to lie down,
one with a cool rag across the brow, shutters
drawn, the other in a soft jungle gym, yahoo,
this puzzle has 15 thousand solutions!
Here's one called Rocking Horse
and how about Sunshine in the Monkey Tree.
Chug, chug, goes the arriving train,
those on the platform toss their hats and scarves
and cheer, the president comes out of the caboose
to declare, The war is over! Corks popping,
people mashing people, knocking over melon stands,
ripping millenniums of bodices. Hangover,
rest now, you'll have lots to do later
inspiring abstemious philosophies and menial tasks
that too contribute to the beauty of this world.

from Primitive Mentor, 2008


Ash Ode

When I saw you ahead I ran two blocks
shouting your name then realizing it wasn’t
you but some alarmed pretender, I went on
running, shouting now into the sky,
continuing your fame and luster. Since I've
been incinerated, I've oft returned to this thought,
that all things loved are pursued and never caught,
even as you slept beside me you were flying off.
At least what's never had can’t be lost, the sieve
of self stuck with just some larger chunks, jawbone,
wedding ring, a single repeated dream,
a lullaby in every elegy, descriptions
of the sea written in the desert, your broken
umbrella, me claiming I could fix it.

Young is sometimes considered a new-generation Frank O'Hara:

"When critics speak of a second-generation New York School poetry, they are referring to poets such as Joe Brainard, Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, Ann Waldman, Dean Young, and Bernadette Mayer. Like their predecessors, these poets have a variety of styles and forms only loosely held together by an imagistic intensity and a tendency towards humor and familiarity. While some speak of a "third generation" and after, influence of the New York School is now so pervasive that such a term has become almost meaningless" ("The Artists & Poets of the New York School," accessed Sept. 28, 2008, Poets.org, http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/ prmMID/5941).

Bernadette Mayer is recommended for a woman's voice.

from Wikipedia (NOT a recommened source, though this is an interesting and apt statement nonetheless):

"He finds the process of creation to be more important than the work itself, and that his poems are more demonstrations than explanations. He also finds that using mangled quotes from technical journals, as he experimented with in First Course in Turbulence, allows for a kind of collage in which tones confront each other. Citing Andre Breton as a major influence, Young finds Surrealism useful in understanding the imagination and removing the boundaries between real and unreal."

 

from William Stobb's blog, Hard to Say

I feel like it can be a back-handed compliment to praise a poet’s early work when that poet is crackling out new poems & poems & great books of poems like he’s locked into some hot circuit, ungrounded. Dean Young rules. I don’t mean that—it’s not about ruling, obviously. But I mean that Dean Young’s poems continue to be a gift to me. Consider the fucking great (can I use that word in this?) brilliant “True / False” poem from Elegy on Toy Piano. It’s a three-full-pager made up of 100 T/F questions by and about Dean Young. In some of these, he plays that familiar, tricked-up autobiography card that I never know what to make of, when he uses “Mary” and “Tony” as characters. Readers of Ruefle and Hoagland will recognize the games these three play with each others’ names and with seemingly autobiographical poems including each other and about each other. Hoagland’s “When Dean Young Talks About Wine” comes to mind and Ruefle’s “A Poem by Dean Young,” which she wrote but which appears in his book—and he’s got her back with “A Poem by Mary Ruefle” which he wrote but which appears in her book.

Anyway, here’s some of “True / False” by Dean Young, from 2005’s Elegy on Toy Piano.

So, yes, these lines play the autobiography game, but that’s nothing, really. It’s gossip-slash-commentary-about-gossip and it’s interesting to that extent. And also I really like the writing of all three of those people, so I always hope they’re happy when I meet them in their poems.

But it’s the poetry of it that’s killer. The transformation in that last one? #66? Where it transfers from pointy-headed theory discourse to an action image of crossing a stream—an action image with religion, yo: walking on water w/ out getting wet? That rules. I don’t mean that. It’s not about ruling.

As I write this, I’ve learned that Press Assistant Sarah Roberts, at the University of Iowa’s Center for the Book has produced a 23-foot-long, accordion-folded print version of this poem, published by Inflorescence Press, which sounds magnificent to me.

All of this has been my long-ass way of saying Dean Young’s new work is great. It’s on fire, you know, in all the ways you’d want to be on fire. Actually, Elegy’s not even Young’s most recent book—there’s one called Embryoyo that’s DUE any day. Ha ha.

But I loved Dean Young’s early work at a time when I needed to learn to love stuff. The nights were long and cold back then, in Grand Forks North Dakota—that’s a shout-out to Grand Forks, by the way: is anybody out there? Of course you are. I lived in GF when I was 22 & that book came out and a few of us were into new poets. My friend Kevin Marzahl is great at reading poems and finding all manner of cool shit to look at, so I kind of got Dean Young as a gift from Kevin. I’d learn a lot from Kevin’s poems, too—his poem “Kiln” won a contest at The Southern Review right about then, when he was 23 or so. I couldn’t find it on the internet, but I’m told that text archives exist.

I meant what I said about love, though. Maybe it comes easy to some people, but for me I have to learn it—this is sounding hokey, so I’m gonna leave it at that. Here’s a poem I loved called “Legend,” from 1992’s Beloved Infidel.

You know, that poem uses some conventions of poetic speech that might now seem… what?… culturally enforced?… to a poet as advanced as Dean Young. I mean, these days, Dean Young is making dynamic moves on so many levels that this sustained first-person narrative might seem naïve. But I admired the speaker of those poems, & wanted to live like him. That guy in those poems—Dean Young or not—was a friend to me. He knew interesting stuff—he had apparently been a med student at one time and there was one poem where he showed an open brain. Cool. He’d had a wide variety of romantic and sexual relationships, knew something about drugs, not to mention reggae (I mean, in “Legend,” that’s a good analysis of the little bob-slash-groove of reggae dancing—I wanted to analyze stuff like that!). That poetic speaker also had hip, activist friends. Those poems seemed to want the world to be a good, or at least better place. And the speaker of those poems was possessed of this ability for vision. I wanted to absorb what I saw like that speaker absorbed those spark-spurting workers in the girders. I was learning from those poems how to see, I guess.
 

A review of Young's book, Embryoyo at http://www.zolandpoetry.com/reviews/Embryoyo.htm at Zooland Poetry (a good site; check it out!):

Review by Eliza Rotterman

Recently, I dreamed Dean Young was giving a reading in my town. I can recall nothing about the reading itself, only that afterwards I approached the book-signing table with a gift wrapped in yellow paper and an excessive amount of tape. I shyly presented Young with the awkward token of schoolgirl love and immediately panicked: I could not remember what was in the package. We suffered a long minute while he unwrapped the gift, tape sticking and un-sticking to his fingers, the paper tearing open to reveal an enormous container of biscotti.

I acknowledge the shortcomings inherent to dream analysis, yet I can’t help but see a connection between the absurd gift and the experience of reading Dean Young’s poetry. Most poets don’t have the moxy to mix pop culture and fine art. Most still rely on willow trees and seabirds to elevate language from signification to expression. However Young’s art occurs in the rapid layering of the pop culture lexicon, idiosyncratic jargon, the absurd, and the lyrical. Young shatters the idea of “clean” poetry that bows down to metaphoric chains and the holy unity of images, and instead, shamelessly exploits the come hither non sequitur, requiring his readers to let go and hold on at the same time. The opening lines of “Luciferin,” the first poem in embryoyo, demonstrates Young’s signature saddle-up and go approach

“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?

The energy of a Young poem lies in the accumulation of zigs and zags, quips and cries, knee jerks and caresses, and like previous collections, the poems in embryoyo are both luminous and deceptive. More than once I have read a Dean Young poem aloud and more than once have I realized, after baiting my audience with the promise of “something hilarious”, that the poem was actually heartbreaking, This is not to say that embryoyo isn’t funny, but most of the humor comes at a price: heartbreak, lest we forget Mary Reuffle’s poetic impersonation entitled “A Poem by Dean Young”: “Don’t think for a fucking instant/ that I don’t have a broken heart.” Even the casual reader will note one of Young’s most ubiquitous themes is the agony love inflicts on the heart. The hyperbolic airing of wounds is melancholic and satirical. Percy Shelley took a hit in Skid, and in embryoyo, it’s Keats: “Bloom rhyming with doom/ pretty much took care of Keats.” Young gets away with this mockery because he is equally seduced by the Romantic impulse. We all know he has fallen on the thorns of life, and his poetry defends the connection between emotion and artistic creation and honors the moment of creation as inseparable from the art itself. “Ten Inspirations” portrays the artist afflicted by the void, then saved by the intensity of feeling, at the moment of creation

You decide to make a flower.
You don’t have any seeds, bees,
bat guano, engravings, pitchforks,
sunshine, scarecrows.
You have a feeling though.
Presto.

Despite the criticism that some artists mistake inspiration as art, Young’s poetry spans only a short distance between inspiration and art, and by that I mean, his art is one of improvisation.

In the ars poetica prose poem of the collection, “Leaves in a Drained Swimming Pool,” Young lays it out:

Theories about art aren’t art anymore than a description of an aphid is an aphid. A menu isn’t a meal. We’re trying to build birds not birdhouses. Put your trust in the inexhaustible nature of the murmur, Breton said that and know when to shut up, I’m saying that. We’re not equations with hats. Nothing appears without an edge. There’s nothing worse than a poem that doesn’t stop. No one lives in a box. The heart isn’t grown on a grid. The ship has sailed and the trail is shiny in the dew. Door slam, howling in the wood, rumble strips before the toll booth. Enter: Fortinbras. Ovipositor. Snow. Bam bam bam, let’s get out of here. What I know about form couldn’t fill a thimble. What form knows about me will get me in the end.