Action Figuring
(Dean Young)

Maybe this is a guy thing but I find
pizza almost completely sustaining.
One does not have meals, one has pizza
and thus is able to work unimpeded
upon one’s theories. One gunman,
definitely one gunman. Such simplicity,
however, can lead to murderous boredom.
In the last 3 days, I have rented 8 videos,
have seen explode: helicopters, satellites,
a bridge, flesh-eating puppets, heads,
hands, the White House, unclassifiable
weaponry, flora and fauna of distant worlds
and still within me some fuse burns on.
Love is not everything yet without it
one explosion is much like any other.
Monday, mine own true saboteur returns
to complicate my diet and napping
deliciously although there will be infinitely
more dishes, more fuzz. Sex isn’t
everything but inside each of us is
a sort of timer, a sort of spring.
My one and only detonator comes with
many small accessories which, if she was
an army man, would be: grenades, bazookas,
flame-throwers, all in danger of being
sucked up a vacuum cleaner hose. I believe
everyone should have the opportunity
to sift through dust and hair and find
an emerald. On the whole, I am in favor
of the sense that “things are more complicated
than one at first thought” which makes one
nervous often in a good, young-in-
the-fingertips way. You could be washing
your car, you could be gleaning naught
from the printed media while inside
is this flying then, gee, how did all
this fruit salad get here? But wait!
Can we ever be sure it is fruit salad
and not some sort of bomb? One gazes into
the other’s eyes and see the reflection
of one’s regrettable nose but more importantly
a darkness that is seeing depth itself
unless one uses opthalmological equipment
and then examines the retina and vascularization
and vitreous humor which in composition
is very akin to amniotic fluid. I can’t remember
swimming without remembering almost drowning.
Either one is about to be frightened to death
or this is prelude to a kiss.

Even Funnier Looking Now
(Dean Young)

If someone had asked me then,
Do you suffer from the umbrage of dawn’s
dark race horses, is your heart a prisoner
of raindrops? Hell yes! I would have said
or No way! Never would I have said,
What could you possibly be talking about?
I had just gotten to the twentieth century
like a leftover girder from the Eiffel Tower.
My Indian name was Pressure-Per-Square-Inch.
I knew I was made of glass but I didn’t
yet know what glass was made of: hot sand
inside me like pee going all the wrong
directions, probably into my heart
which I knew was made of gold foil
glued to dust. It was you I loved,
only you but you kept changing
into different people which made
kissing your mouth very exciting.
Of the birds, I loved the crows the best,
sitting in their lawn chairs, ranting
about their past campaigns, the broken
supply lines, the traitors. Some had bodies
completely covered with feathers like me,
some were almost invisible like you.
And of the rivers, I loved the Susquehanna,
how each spring it would bring home a boy
who didn’t listen disguised as a sack of mud.
Everyone knew if you were strong enough
and swam fast and deep enough, you’d reach
another city but no one was ever strong enough.
Along the banks: the visceral honeysuckle.
That was the summer we tanned on the roof
reading the Russians. You told me
you broke up with your boyfriend I lost count.
Dusky, pellucid and grave.
In the Chekhov story, nothing happened but
a new form of misery was nonetheless delineated.
Accidentally, I first touched your breast.
Rowboat, I tried to think of rhymes for rowboat.
And sequins and yellow and two-by-fours.
In one of your parents’ bathrooms,
the handles were silver dolphins.
My ears were purple.
The crayons melted in the sun,
that was one way. Another was to tear things up
and tape them together wrong.
That was the summer I lived in the attic
and the punk band never practiced below.
Your breasts were meteors, never meteorites.
There was something wrong with my tongue.
There was my famous use of humor
that Jordan said was the avoidance of emotion.
I couldn’t hold on to a nickel.
There was that pitcher on the mound,
older, facing his former team. He had lost
some of his stuff but made up for it with
cerebrum. Your breasts were never rusty.
Your breasts reflected the seeming-so.
Your mouth I wanted my mouth over,
your eyes my eyes into,
into your Monday afternoons I would try to cram
my Sunday nights, into your anthropology paper
I wanted to put my theories,
your apartment I would put my records in
and never get them back.
Here, you said: another baby avocado tree.
You threw your shoe. I broke
the refrigerator and the fossil fish.
I broke my shoulder blade.
I tried to make jambalaya.
To relax the organism, the cookbook said,
pound with a mallet on the head or shell.
Your friends all thought you were crazy.
My friends all thought I was crazy.
The names of Aztec gods were on one page,
serotonin uptake inhibitors on the other.
You fell in the street carrying a pumpkin.
I walked home alone in the snow.
I broke my hand.
Your light meter was in my glove box.

A Color of the Sky
(Tony Hoagland)

Windy today and I feel less than brilliant,
driving over the hills from work.
There are the dark parts on the road
when you pass through clumps of wood
and the bright spots where you have a view of the ocean,
but that doesn’t make the road an allegory.

I should call Marie and apologize
for being so boring at dinner last night,
but can I really promise not to be that way again?
And anyway, I’d rather watch the trees, tossing
in what certainly looks like sexual arousal.

Otherwise it’s spring, and everything looks frail;
the sky is baby blue, and the just-unfurling leaves
are full of infant chlorophyll,
the very tint of inexperience.

Last summer’s song is making a comeback on the radio,
and on the highway overpass,
the only metaphysical vandal in America has written
MEMORY LOVES TIME
in big black spraypaint letters,

which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back.

Last night I dreamed of X again.
She’s like a stain on my subconscious sheets.
Years ago she penetrated me
but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed,
I never got her out,
but now I’m glad.

What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.
What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.
What I thought was an injustice
turned out to be a color of the sky.

Outside the youth center, between the liquor store
and the police station,
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;

overflowing with blossomfoam,
like a sudsy mug of beer;
like a bride ripping off her clothes,

dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,

so Nature’s watsefulness seems quietly obscene.
It’s been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.

The Time Wars
(Tony Hoagland)

It was the winter we ate a lot of oatmeal to stay warm.
We lived on 17th and G Streets; Kath called it the G spot.
At night in the bathtub I read The Collected Letters of Virginia Woolf,
trying to keep the pages of 20th-century prose from getting wet,
reading the guest lists for her dinner parties
as she knocked out book after book between her shattering depressions.

Sometimes I would meet Richard at the Chinese place for dinner,
and one two three hours would vanish like our food.
We would stand outside The Great Wall, adjusting our scarves
in a pastoral moment of urban separation,
watching the cabs whiz by in the dusk.

The Vietnam War monument was just five blocks away;
on Saturday you would always see a vet or two,
in their windbreakers and baseball caps–
heads down, crying in the shrubs–
the little POW buttons and various insignia attached to their clothing
like they were advertising something.

We ourselves were fighting the Time Wars:
we could feel it speeding up, rapidly escaping,
like the hiss from a leaky balloon.
We were trying to plug it, to slow it down, to decelerate,
but none of us was having much success–

One day in February Kath brought in some roses and said,
“Here, the sun came 93 million miles
to make these flowers that I killed for you,”
and I said, “Kathleen, my talents are not capacious enough
to properly exaggerate your virtues,”
and we both burst out laughing
and time stopped right over our heads like a little red car.

On June 14th, 1940, Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal,
“Windy day. I am the hare, far ahead of my critics, the hounds.”
Something endearing about the mixture of weather report and vanity.
Something lonely about this image of success.

We ourselves aren’t thinking about the future anymore.
What we want is to calm time down, to get time in a good mood,
to make time feel wanted.
We just want to give time many homemade gifts,
covered with fingerprints and kisses.