Bender
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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