Michael T. Young Verse-Virtual 2016 July

July 2016

I studied and practiced martial arts almost fanatically when I was a teenager but injured my back when I was fifteen. I started writing poetry and by the time my back healed, I decided to be a poet rather than the next Bruce Lee. Since then I’ve published four collections of poetry and received recognitions such as a fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. You can keep up with my work at www.michaeltyoung.com.

The Generosity of the Past

In our apartment there was always light
splitting through the windows like a mercy,
illuminating bookshelves and what we thought,
our conversations or our glasses of wine
lifted to toast each day of generosity:
the quantity surpassing what we knew.

We read our books, discussed the world we knew,
interpretations shifting with the light.
We lived by an aesthetic of generosity,
art and music painting our world with mercy,
although diluted by several bottles of wine
and so reduced to memory and thought.

Sediment in the bottles was like a thought,
a remnant of the past and all we knew:
nights listening to Liszt or tasting wine,
arguing over how things changed with light,
how sometimes saying nothing is like mercy,
and disagreeing was a generosity.

The simplest things are forms of generosity:
like paying bills, or making tea with thought
for how you like it: sugar, a little mercy.
We knew that once but then forgot we knew.
So when we changed we blamed the changing light,
and turned to vinegar like aging wine.

But then we’d drink just anything: old wine,
bad scotch, tequila. Though still generosity,
a generosity that took no delight,
not in our books, not in a word or thought.
We toasted to the past and what we knew,
began the long goodbyes with little mercy.

If time allowed us to forgive, that’s mercy.
And I recall with every glass of wine
because it’s who I am and what I knew
and I am thankful for the generosity
of that time, for its store of meaning and thought,
which are to me here now a kind of light:

for it’s a light that makes a spectrum of mercy,
colorful thoughts as deep and rich as wine,
a generosity that’s always new.

The Endless List of Everything

You always remember where you were when
an archetype peeks from behind the curtains.
I was in an Ethiopian restaurant in Georgetown,
sipping mead, talking with friends, scooping
spiced meats with tears of injera—then it happened:
the silliest music began to play. And when I say
silliest music, I mean the Platonic ideal, I mean
the air’s fabric ripped pouring out a cavatina
of such ridiculous modulations Groucho Marx
laughed in his coffin, I mean the embroidered
drapes pulsed to the rhythm as in a cartoon,
I mean the horn from the taxi outside chuckled
in between descriptions of its existential crisis,
I mean a little bird flew up to me and said
he was the solar system’s janitor and could I please
not stick my chewed abstractions under the table,
I mean the waiter’s voice changed, sounding like
Oliver North with a mouthful of spaghetti
explaining the virtues of his toothbrush, then
like Walter Mondale trying to convince me
that I was forgettable even to an elephant,
but that this moment would lodge in me so deeply
I’d be writing about it twenty years later
comparing it to the endless list of everything
without ever succeeding to number it among them.

Molting

She browses bird books and whistles
to herself. At night, to lift her dreams

from the mundane, she nests in
a cradle of down pillows. In the morning,

she lights a candle, dips her finger
in a puddle of wax, lets it cool on the tip

to remember the flight of Daedalus,
who, unlike his son, winged coolly on.

She collects feathers in a book and flips
the pages over to feel the air, forgetting

what holds her down or back, everyone
who told her she’d never take flight, ride

desire to the far mountain ridge where
she’d run with sundogs in the solar fields.

Now even on cold days she’ll stand at the cliffs,
looking out to sea in such a way, her eyes

can’t see the ground beneath her feet.
Sometimes she can feel her wings growing.

“The Generosity of the Past” was originally published in Think Journal!,
“The Endless List of Everything,” and “Molting,” were both originally published in Off the Coast.
©2016 Michael T. Young