Bender: New and Selected Poems
By Dean Young
2/5
()
About this ebook
Dean Young
Dean Young was born in Columbia, Pennsylvania, and received his MFA from Indiana University. His collections of poetry include Strike Anywhere (1995), winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry; Skid (2002), finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Elegy on Toy Piano (2005), finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Primitive Mentor (2008), shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize. He has also written a book on poetics, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction (2010).
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Reviews for Bender
1 rating1 review
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I liked Dean Young's first book of poetry from way back, so looked forward to reading this one expectantly. Alas, there were some poems in this collection I liked, but many were just too much to slog through and did not speak to me.
Book preview
Bender - Dean Young
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
like a wet yo-yo. Agg tag glatmoogen,
I approximated in her native tongue but
it could not staunch the tears. The clouds
were bells. I wilth almays lube you,
she sobbed, but I mush return hushbang
of factory. Vulcanization is the process
by which rubber fibers are brought into
alignment conferring elasticity but how,
how? With sulfur. I know that now.
And sometimes hydrogen peroxide.
Bay Arena
When I worked in the bookstore in Berkeley,
upstairs some woman would sing, alluring
as lava, husky as tar, sometimes it’d be
a whole band driving us a little crazy
downstairs because even good music
heard through a ceiling gets nerve-wracking,
a constant strain to make a whole of it,
catch the lyrics slurred by plumbing prattle
and footfall like you’re getting complicated
directions over a bad connection or trying
to figure out just why it is you can’t
divide by zero. But I’d say to Michelle
who did the ordering and sometimes would
ask me should she order The Wasps of
Puerto Rico, 55 bucks a shot, and I’d say
No way, it’ll rot on the shelf like
everything else in Latin America
what with the jungle, poverty, and burn off,
so she’d order three and they’d sell
immediately. More stuff to mess up the store.
I hated customers, how they charged in, tusks
dismantling the alphabet, ranting, raving
in the thick accents of demand, something
about Puerto Rico, something about wasps
as if I was wired individually to each book
and in back, they’re stuffing Treasuries
of Haiku in their pants, ripping covers off,
who knows, twice I found empty flaps, volumes
by Ricoeur who said I think, Everything is
profoundly cracked, although it might have been
an epigraph he used by someone else because
that’s all I ever got to read, an education
of pithy, lost snippets, always trying to do
a million things at once, our filing system
like something out of Kafka, smudgy
index cards organized by press, don’t mix up
a slash with a check, so I’d have to explain
and search through Books in Print because they’d
forgotten their glasses but really they were
people looking for books who couldn’t read!
So I’d say to Michelle in the quiet hour
between 3 and 3:15, Man, that girl can sing,
and she’d just uh-huh because she too lived
upstairs and even Pavarotti would get sickening,
all that passion coming through a wall when
you just want to eat your green beans, watch
a little TV. I mean all music verges on pure
irritation, noise, wearying, weary. Michelle
feeding her turtle ripped up lettuce. Turtle
called Myrtle of course who it was okay
to bring to work, at least she wasn’t breast-
feeding at the front desk the way L did who
was finally fired not only for not doing a thing
but fouling up everyone else. I mean there you are,
trying to calm a customer and she opens her blouse,
ladles out this enormous breast, it had a tendency
to knock out everything from anyone’s head.
Eternally nonplussed creature, I mean this
turtle who I liked all right but how close
can you get to a turtle? It pulls its
head in, pushes it out, blinks—mostly
I worried about stepping on it then
some guy comes in waving a jar of Prego,
screaming about the New Deal and, This is it,
I think, I will die in Berkeley in a splatter
of extra thick sauce, a corona of glass
spread out like my incomplete poems,
my brains spilled out like sensibility
as outside the street starts percolating
in the gelling light. Soon the protesters
will be throwing rocks at the gym because
a volleyball court’s finally gone into
People’s Park like the university’s been
threatening to do through the ages of Aquarius
and later cops shooting wooden pegs but
that afternoon I’m getting my falafel
lunch at the caboose on Bancroft from
the guy who always asks me how I’m managing
and tells me how he’s sleeping, not too
good, who could these days, and I say Amen,
handing over my 2.25, giving this Arab
a more mixed message than I intend and
the guy in the tutu and evening gloves,
the Love-Hate man with rouge in his beard
is matching the blustering fundamentalist
syllable by syllable: for every hell a bell,
every damnation a dalmatian, shadow for
shadow, wagging Bible against wagging
New Age Singles, satori, samsara, and then
I hear her like smoke my mother blew in
my ear when I had an earache and I strain
against what lashes me to the mast. We are
stardust, we are golden, and there she is.
She must weigh 300 pounds, head like a glop
of Playdoh dropped on a mountain of smoldering
hams, feet immense puddles in those specially
designed fat shoes that lace on both sides
and that voice like a swan