Skipping the Reception by Dean Young

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.

How I Get My Ideas by Dean Young

Sometimes you just have to wait
15 seconds then beat the prevailing nuance
from the air. If that doesn't work,
try to remember how many times
you've wakened in the body of an animal,
two arms, two legs, willowy antennae.
Try thinking what it would be like
to never see your dearest again.
Stroke her gloves, sniff his overcoat.
If that's a no-go, call Joe
who's never home but keeps changing
the melody of his message.
Cactus at night emits its own light,
the river flows under the sea.
Dear face I always recognize but never
know, everything has a purpose
from which it must be freed,
maybe with crowbars, maybe the gentlest breeze.
Always turn in the direction of the skid.
If it's raining, use the rain
to lash the windowpanes or,
in a calmer mode, deepen the new greens
nearly to a violet. I can't live
without violet although it's red
I most often resort to.
Sometimes people become angelic when they cry,
sometimes only ravaged.
Technically, Mary still owes me a letter,
her last was just porcupine quills and tears,
tears that left a whitish residue
on black construction paper.
Sometimes I look at used art books at Moe's
just to see women without their clothes.
How can someone so rich,
who can have fish whenever he wants,
go to baseball games,
still feel such desperation?
I'm afraid I must insist
on desperation. By the fourth week
the embryo has nearly turned itself
inside out. If that doesn't help,
you'll just have to wait which
may involve sleeping which may involve
dreaming and sometimes dreaming works.
Father, why have you returned,
dirt on your morning vest?
You cannot control your laughter.
You cannot control your love.
You know not to hit the brakes on ice
but do anyway. You bend the nail
but keep hammering because
hammering makes the world.

Facet by Dean Young

For weeks, I've gone unbrokenbut 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.

He Said Turn Here by Dean Young

and then Tony showed us the lake
where he had thrown some of his sadness last summer
and it had dissolved like powder
so he thought maybe the lake could take
some of the radiant, aluminum kind
he had been making lately.
And it did.
It was a perfect lake,
none of the paint had chipped off,
no bolts showing, the arms that Dante
and Virgil would have to hack through
not even breaking the surface.
Mumbling Italian to itself,
it had climbed down two wooden stairs
back to the beach now that the rains were done.
How strange to be water so close to the ocean
yet the only other water you get to talk to
comes from the sky. Maybe this is why
it seems so willing to take on
Tony’s sadness which sometimes corrodes
his friends, which is really
many different sadnesses, smaller
and smaller, surrounded by more
and more space, each a world and
at its core an engine like a bee
inside a lily, like buzzing inside
the bee. It seems like nothing
could change its color although
we couldn’t tell what color it was,
it kept changing. In the summer,
Tony says he comes down early each day
and there’s no one around so the lake
barely says a thing when he dives in
and once when his kitchen was on fire in Maine
and he was asleep, the lake came and bit his hand,
trying to drag him to safety
and some nights in New Mexico,
he can hear it howling,
searching for him in the desert
so we’re glad Tony has this lake
and we promise to come back in August
and swim with him across,
maybe even race.

Clam Ode by Dean Young

One attempts to be significant on a grand scale
in the knockdown battle of life
but settles.
It is clammy today, meaning wet and gray,
not having a hard, calciniferous shell.
I love the expression "happy as a clam,"
how it imparts buoyant emotion
to a rather, when you get down to it,
nonexpressive creature. In piles of ice
it awaits its doom pretty much the same
as on the ocean floor it awaits
life's bouquet and banquet and sexual joys.
Some barncles we know are eggs dropped from outer space
but clams, who has a clue how they reproduce?
By trading clouds?
The Chinese thought them capable of prolonging life
while clams doubtlessly considered
the Chinese the opposite.
I remember the jawbreakers my dad would buy me
on the wharf at Stone Harbor, New Jersey;
every thirty seconds you'd take out
the one in your mouth
to check what color it turned.
What does this have to do with clams?
A feeling.
States of feeling, unlike the states of the upper midwest,
are difficult to name.
That is why music was invented
which caused a whole new slew of feelings
and is why since,
people have had more feelings than they know what to do with
so you can see it sorta backfired
like a fire extinguisher that turns out to be a flamethrower.
They look alike, don't they?
So if you're buying one be sure
you don't get the other,
the boys in the stockroom are stoners
who wear their pants falling down
and deserve their own Gulliver's Travels island.
The clam however remains calm.
Green is the color of the kelp it rests on
having a helluva wingding calm.
I am going to kill you in butter and white wine
so forgive me, great clam spirit,
join yourself to me through the emissary
of this al dente fettuccine
so I may be as qualmless and happy as you.