[New-Poetry] Dean Young Through Mists

[David Graham]

We Through Mists Descry


So much energy. People buying watermelons,
boarding airplanes, watching their parents die,
and writing poems about it while above throbs
the celestial. I love how sadness can turn
celebratory, the childlike apocalyptic.
Bees return to their hives, freighted
with nectars. Shadows rise from the mud,
flinging back their wet hair and even though
this seashell is very small, it's still singing
about the void. Often great tension arises
between sincerity and rhetoricity imposing
vague profundities. Outside a man is failing
to push-start his car, albeit a very polished car.
Remember how rash Apollo was even while inventing
calculus? He did it to impress some skinny kid
milking a goat after all. Let's not forget
the head in the furnace, how burning is
laughing and laughing is also crying out.
When my father died, I saw his spirit snag
in a tree, a woman running across a parking lot,
windows full of smoke. When my father died,
his spirit snagged in a tree then left behind
its last body of plastic bags. I saw the sky
wring its blue until it cracked and oils
leaked out. I thought I was seeing everything
and could turn off the white light with a switch.
Satellite dishes in every yard, shiny shiny stars.
I'd like to be completely free but I want everything
to belong to me. You fall upon the roses of life
and bleed and people think you're a fool. But later,
at the cash bar, the disputants are transformed
by the lips of their eyes, the sex organs
of exhaled cigarette smoke. Even if it's only
skin-deep, once you derive the area, consider
how the skin goes into the ears, behind the eyes,
down the throat, that's an awful lot of beauty.
Once someone told me I should live by water.
Once someone sold me a surge protector for every room.

-- Dean Young.  Skid.  U Pittsburgh, 2002.






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David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/academics/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/academics/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
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