Untitled Document

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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,

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.

INTERVIEW WITH DEAN YOUNG

The first line of yours that amazed me was "First you will fall in love with what you don't understand. The baby ram butts the shiny tractor." Do you think your poems are defined by misunderstanding?

I think they're very much about misunderstanding. There's that old writer's truism, "Write what you know"—well, you don't know very much. I think to tie meaning too closely to understanding misses the point. In graduate school, nobody understood what I was saying, and I didn't have a clue either. So, I wrote my first book to be understood, to be accepted. I got my father's ghost off my back. I got a job. I wasn't in graduate school anymore. And I realized that the poems in the first book weren't by me—they were instilled in my head. And that not being understood, not being accepted, was my subject.

In your forthcoming book, Skid, I was surprised to discover a sadness, even an edginess to the imagery, as in "You know not to hit the brakes on ice / but do anyway. You bend the nail / but keep hammering because / hammering makes the world."

I think my first two books were relatively austere. In the following books, I tried to work toward celebration and joy and goofiness. But life conspires against you, hands you tragedy, proves that nothing can last. I think all of that is more apparent in Skid than it was in First Course in Turbulence.

In "Blue Garden" you write, "A poem should be / a noise and then it should shut up," which made me think about the brevity of lyric intensity. Do you think of poems as offering a kind of psychic burst?

Well, we spend so much of our time like dumb animals. Our psychology is a little bit flat, and we're consumed with the materiality of life: maintaining our bodies, getting things done, going here, going there. But then, when these portals of almost clairvoyant empathy open up for us, they're amazing. That's what we look for in art—the moment when something comes rushing in. All you have to do is make yourself available, accessible, perhaps in ways you haven't done before. Of course, you can't live in that state. There are also long periods when you can't find it, and they're terrible. They're like being in a desert. Everything you read just plays across your eyeballs.

Are there poets whose work gets you into that state?

Some of the French Surrealists do it for me, as well as Tomaz Salamun, O'Hara, Lorca—poets whose vitality reminds me of the great joy of being able to make art, even when it's about terrible things.

What about a poet like Paul Celan?

Celan's poetry is a black hole for me. As the language of his poems becomes both more and more fractured and compact, it feels like less and less can escape. I admire that level of psychic concentration, but it's something I don't go to. I would pick up Keats or Hopkins before Celan, or Emily Dickinson. Emily Dickinson gives me a headache! There's definitely a greatness there, and something about the language is totally engaging—but finally, it doesn't sustain me. Remember how Ashbery's "Three Poems," begins with something like, "I realized that I could either leave everything out or put everything in"? I want to put everything in. The critiques of representation, the critiques of manifestations of the self, the materiality of language—I look at all that stuff as opening up opportunities for shimmer and wobble, not as a form of negation. And, I'm constantly getting involved in meat.

Meat?

Yeah, meat, and parasols, and my cat.

To read the rest of this interview, please click here to purchase JUBILAT 4