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  for Laurie

  Contents

  Title Page

  Note to Reader

  The Afterlife

  Afterward (Little Evening Sermon)

  Alternating Current

  Anti-Ambition Ode

  Articles of Faith

  Arts of Camouflage

  A Student in a Distant Land

  Bay Arena

  A Beginner’s Guide to Endings

  Bell Tower

  Beloved Infidel

  Bird Sanctuary

  Bivouacked & Garrisoned Capitol

  Bolinas, California

  The Brutal Filament Inside Aglow

  The Business of Love is Cruelty

  Casting Off

  Changing Genres

  Changing Your Bulb

  Charm School

  Chest Pains of the Romantic Poets

  Clam Ode

  Cloud Shadow on Water

  Commencement Address

  The Commendation

  Cotton in a Pill Bottle

  Deadline

  Dear Friend

  Dear Reader

  Delphiniums in a Window Box

  Discharged Into Clouds

  Dog Toy

  Drama in Last Acts

  Drunker Etc.

  Easily Bruised

  Easy as Falling Down Stairs

  Edios

  Elegy on Toy Piano

  Errata

  Even Funnier Looking Now

  An Excitement of Windows

  Exit Exam

  Exit Ovidian

  Facet

  Fate

  Fire is Speaking

  The First Time & the Time Before That

  First You Must

  Flamenco

  Flood Plain

  Frottage

  Gaga Gala

  Ghost Gust

  Glider

  Grand Attempt

  Gruss

  Halfstory Halflife

  Hammer

  Handy Guide

  Happy Hour

  Harvest

  Hello Old Friend

  Hold On

  How Grasp Green

  How I Get My Ideas

  How to Be a Surrealist

  Human Lot

  The Infirmament

  The Invention of Heaven

  Inverness Grey

  I Said Yes I Meant No

  I See a Lily on Thy Brow

  Lace

  Last Words

  Learn By Doing

  Lives of the Olympians

  Lives of the Poets

  Lives of the Robots

  Loose-Strife

  Lucifer

  Luciferin

  May Deaths

  More Anecdotal Evidence

  Mortal Ode

  My People

  Myth Mix

  My Work among the Insects

  The New Optimism

  The New Savagery

  No Forgiveness Ode

  Note Enclosed with My Old Jean Jacket

  Ode to Hangover

  Off the Hook Ode

  The Old Enthusiasms

  On Being Asked by a Student If He Should Ask Out Some Girl

  One Story

  Oracle

  Original Monkey

  Our Kind of People

  Out in the Sapphic Traffic

  The Oversight Committee

  Phantom Pains

  Pleasure

  Poem with a Stone in It

  Procession

  Pweth

  Ready-Made Bouquet

  Red Glove Thrown in Rosebush

  Resignation Letter

  Restoration Ode

  Revolutions Tend toward Orthodoxy

  The Rhythms Pronounce themselves Then Vanish

  The River Merchant, Stuck in Kalamazoo, Writes His Wife a Letter during Her Semester Abroad

  Robert Desnos (1900–1945)

  Rothko’s Yellow

  Rubber Typewriter

  Rushing through the Night

  Scarecrow on Fire

  Scherzo

  Scribblers Everywhere

  Selected Recent and New Errors

  Sex with Strangers

  Side Effects

  So the Grasses Grow

  The Soul

  Sources of the Delaware

  Speech Therapy

  Springtime for Snowman

  Static City

  Storms

  Sunflower

  Teetering Lullaby

  Thing Is

  Three Weeks Late

  Thrown as if Fierce and Wild

  Today’s Visibility

  Tongue Doctor

  To Those of You Alive in the Future

  Trace Elements

  Tribe

  The Unattainable

  Undertow

  Unstable Particles

  Upon Hearing of My Friend’s Marriage Breaking Up, I Envision an Attack from Outer Space

  Vacationland

  The Velvet Underground

  Vermeer

  Warbler

  Whale Watch

  What Form after Death

  Where I Left Off

  While You Were at the Doctor’s

  Whoz Side U On, Anyway?

  Wind Off a River

  Winged Purposes

  With Hidden Noise

  Wolfspeak

  Yawn

  You Could Always Teach

  Zero Hour

  About the Author

  Books by Dean Young

  Links

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Special Thanks

  BENDER

  The Afterlife

  Four a.m. and the trees in their nocturnal turns

  seem free from our ideas of what trees should be

  like the moment in a dance you let your partner go

  and suddenly she’s loose fire and unapproachable.

  Yesterday I saw L again, by a case of kiwis

  and she seemed wrongly tall as if wearing cothurni.

  Would it be better never to see her at all?

  In Jim’s poem about death, shirts pile on a chair.

  I imagine them folded, the way shirts are,

  arms behind the back, then boxed in mothballs

  and marked with Magic Marker, Jim’s Shirts.

  Probably what would really happen

  is his wife might save a few to hang among her own.

  Even that off-the-shoulder thing of hers

  commingled with grief, overlapping ghosts.

  The rest she’d give away, maybe dump

  in a Salvation Army bin in some parking lot

  or just drop off in People’s Park. It scares me

  to think of that guy with sores on his face

  trying on the parrot shirt. It scares me

  how well it fits. Maybe if I just walked up to her

  and said, Enough. Maybe she still has my blue belt.

  Outside, the rain riffs off the shingles, wind

  mews down the exhaust tube of my heater.

  On the isinglass flames rush in smudges

  like lovers who must pass through each other

  as punishment for too much lust and feeding.

  Afterward

  (Little Evening Sermon)

  By the seventh time the story was told,

  the girl stood naked in the sprinklers

  and the fighter pilot had flown on E

  through Russia. The bear could almost talk,

  the crippled dog could almost run and we

  could almost love each other forever.

  Funny word, forever. You can put it at the end

  of almost any sentence and feel better about

  yourself, about how you’ve worked in a spray

  of sparks accomplishing almost nothing

  and feel that’s exactly what the gods

  intended; look at the galaxies, spilled

  milk, their lust and retrograde whims.

  What was it you were promised? I’m sorry

  if it turned out to be a lie. But the girl

  really did drink fire from a flower,

  the dog did leap a chasm, days advanced

  and the stars spun through our umbras

  and threw their backward light upon

  the bent, deniable, rusted, unaffirmable,

  blank-prone forever.

  Alternating Current

>   Throbbing is the sunflower,

  throbbing is the sea, one two three

  periods in a row—no, not periods,

  ellipsis—and on and on the locusts go.

  Silly boy scrubbing at a spot, solar eclipse

  projecting half-bitten dot in the pinholed box.

  And throbbing is the head upon the breast,

  throbbing the knot inside the chest

  so I can hardly say your name. Trains

  rattle down by the river, the finger

  with its sliver throbs, the first

  Monday of every month, Grandmother polished

  the silver. Is life just intervals of pulses,

  ripples spreading on a lake

  from where the rock was tossed? Do not

  forsake me darling though we be carried off.

  Every instance has its day and night,

  every inkling is full of blinks,

  the power going on and off so fast

  we can hardly think until here comes a storm,

  poor dog scuttled under the bed, poor dream

  we recall almost not at all no matter

  how we cling because throbbing is the sea

  and we be torn apart.

  Anti-Ambition Ode

  Is the idea to make a labyrinth

  of the mind bigger? What’s the matter?

  You still come out of the womb-dark

  into the sneering court of the sun

  and don’t know which turn to take.

  So what? You’re made of twigs anyway.

  You were on an errand but never came back,

  spent too long poking something with a stick.

  Was it dead or never alive?

  Invisibility will slow down soon enough

  for you to catch up and pull it over yourself.

  No one knows what color the first hyena’s tongue

  to reach you will be.

  Or the vultures who are slow, careful unspellers.

  So go ahead, become an expert in sleep or not,

  either way you can live in a rose or smoke

  only so long.

  You will still be left off the list.

  You will still be rain, blurry as a mouse.

  Articles of Faith

  I used to like Nicole Kidman

  now I like Kirsten Dunst.

  Jennifer Aniston is a schmuck

  but Brad’s sure a rotter

  even if I was the only one who liked him in Troy

  he had the Achillean pout right.

  I much prefer the Creature from the Black Lagoon’s

  environmental warning

  to the Invisible Man’s exploration of neurosis

  although in the update with Kevin Bacon

  I like the nudity.

  When it says at the bottom in small print

  language, gore and nudity

  I like that

  but the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

  made me cry on an airplane,

  got to be from lack of cabin pressure.

  Grown men should not wear shorts in airports

  unless they are baggage handlers.

  Bearded men should never play the flute.

  Most heavy metal music is anger over repressed homoerotic urges

  is the sort of idea that got me beat up in high school.

  There is nothing sadder than a leaf

  falling from a tree then catching an updraft higher than the tree

  then getting stuck in a gutter.

  Symbolism is highly suspicious because it can’t be helped.

  There is always something you can never touch, never have

  but there it is, right in front of you.

  The opposite is also true.

  Even though the bells are ringing

  your glissando is private.

  Truth labors to keep up with the tabloids.

  Every word is a euphemism.

  Every accident is organized by a secret system

  and you’re telling me life isn’t personal?

  The starfish disgorges its stomach to devour its prey.

  A network of deceptions festoons the cortege.

  An X-Acto knife cuts a kingfisher from an oil company ad.

  In the beginning the divine creator wrote 999 words and created

  999 demigods to

  translate each word into 999 words and 999 angels to

  translate each translated word into 999 words and 999

  exalted priests to translate each translated word of the

  translated words into 999 words and we are an error in

  the transcription of one of those words.

  Vows exchanged in an aerodrome.

  Ovals without consequence.

  Masterpiece wrapping paper.

  The hurricane makes of homes exploded brains.

  Central Intelligence Agency.

  The early explorers were extremely agitated men, antisocial,

  violent, prone to drink.

  Demons walk the earth.

  Says so on a T-shirt.

  We are born defenseless.

  It’s a miracle.

  Arts of Camouflage

  After years of walking funny,

  of sleeping sideways like a shrub,

  of trying to transform myself into a panther,

  the morning I woke transformed into a panther

  wasn’t all that different from waking transformed

  into a jellyfish, dune grass, into nothing at all.

  Same sun in the eyes, same clouds bleeting

  like lambs, bleeting like lions eating lambs,

  same stupid choice of shirts:

  blue or brown,

  would I be hiding in the sky or ground

  which finally didn’t matter much

  because I tore them all apart. This was in ’42.

  We felt pretty rowdy in ’42.

  There was the war. There was stacking stuff

  upon the endless courseways. Nobody was eating

  chocolate, then suddenly chocolate was okay.

  There was deferment, inkblots, obscure

  forestries. The Effort. Kids today,

  they look at a rock and think nothing,

  think a rock can’t just rise up and smote.

  There wasn’t all this equipment you see advertised

  even in commercials about killing ants.

  Still we carried plenty.

  Detonators. French letters. Atropine.

  Philosophy tracts. A thing is never fully itself

  but often talks to itself in code.

  You’d dream you were surrounded by torn-open bodies

  and wake surrounded by torn-open bodies until

  the spiritual seemed a preferable dwelling

  but purely in a terrifying manner like a leaf

  falling from a tree or a stranger

  speaking your name.

  Sure, I believe in life after death,

  it’s just that this life after death

  is so much like the last one, no one notices

  they’ve already died bunches of times. Same

  trenches. Corrosive fogs. Same protective coatings

  nearly impossible to get off and when you do,

  you’ve damaged what’s inside. Actually I never

  changed into a panther. I just said that

  to get your attention like someone yelling Fire

  when there’s really not even a spark,

  in fact it’s rained solid for weeks.

  A Student in a Distant Land

  We could see some mountains I didn’t

  know the name of where some adventurers

  had recently gone to freeze to death.

  She said, Our lives are but torn bits

  of party hats blown by breezes of the sea.

  I said, When with I lousy swordfish.

  My boat would be arriving soon, blasting

  gas from itself. In the charming way

  of this place, small children dressed

  as trees kept running up to sell us

  hunks of coal decorated with teeth.

  Wool, she said, is an excellent source

  of income for these islanders. I said,

  Thrumming skylight, bridge of will-you.

  We had known each other but a short time

  yet my love for her, like a coat hung

  from a nail, resembled me in ways I

  did not resemble myself as if something

  dear had been reft from me only to be

  restored with the matchbooks of hotels

  I’d never been to in its pockets. Your pain,

  she murmured, your future, your rope burns.

  Her body, under the massive yak hide, glistened