You'd lost your place before but never
so committedly. All that time you almost knew
what you were saying wasn’t what you meant.
Not that now some artithematic or shift
to the left a couple definitions
will ever be enough to make your message
clear to yourself or anyone else, no matter
the perfect comic timing of its warning.
Oh, I loved the baby tyger of your laugh.
No idea what your acts of resignation are now,
the current permanent condition as we call
the stiffer piles of sand but wasn’t it grand
to give up steady state for zoological
derangement even if we knew soon the claws
were due, a throat closed in jaws
until suffocation and the raparian,
burning, lush, combative glut of the world
has its hood pulled over it and hushes.
Dean Young's books include Elegy on Toy Piano, Embryoyo, and most recently Primitive Mentor. He begins teaching at the University of Texas at Austin as William Livingston Chair of Poetry this fall.
Tess Taylor, Review of Dean Young's Embryoyo
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