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Dean Young
Last Words
I too love my small life.
The miracle gets shoved into the oven,
comes out with its desire whitened.
A crack is not necessarily a fault,
and when the fire lies down, it becomes
earth and earth has a dream: us,
so you can’t be too careful. In fact,
you can’t be careful at all.
Too many facets.
The bus of everything
pulls into the depot of nothing.
Or is that the bus of nothing
pulling into the depot of everything?
In god’s image: acid-yellow slow sign.
In god’s image: muster of crows.
The times the symptoms are memory loss and falling.
Times the symptoms are memory loss and falling,
and the sick friend walks across town and knocks,
and the sad friend hangs a map of laughter
on his office wall, and the crazy friend swears
everything will be all right.
Sure it will.
O horse, come nearer.
Maybe when you die.
’Tis well, says George Washington,
dismissing the doctors trying to
blister and bleed him out of becoming
the dollar bill. I am slain, says Polonius,
Act III, scene iv, the only instance
of his getting quickly to the point,
audience reaction calculated to the ounce
of fake blood. Too much: farce, too little:
quaint. Walt Whitman wrote that death
is far luckier than we supposed, although
he may have considered addenda as he lay
turning into mush, not grass.
Your last words, I never want to hear them!
What if everyone’s combine into one big poem,
and I’m stuck with a preposition? Oh well,
even prepositions have their place,
like kudzu. We are human beings, not
texts. Not loudspeakers or layers of gas.
Not even jellyfish. Is tranquility
possible? I want dot dot dot gasp.
You must dot dot dot gurgle.
I used to move pretty fast.
Invisible, barefoot river.
DEAN YOUNG teaches in the spring semesters at the Iowa Writers Workshop.
His fifth book of poetry, Skid, is available from the University
of Pittsburgh Press.
“Last Words” appears in our Spring
2002 issue.
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