Michael T. Young Verse-Virtual 2016 November

November 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.

Birdwatcher

For seven years I’ve tried to approach the ground zero
of my neighborhood, which happens to be the nation’s,
my daily walk to work, for a long time, through allies
of wreckage, detours that couldn’t circle wider
than the stench of burning flesh, and though
the rubble was carried off and quotidian alarms
sounded the all-clear, the horns triggering explosives
to sink new foundations, the dwelling of our
persistent belief in a future, and my own, the ribs
of the new station arcing like a nest, I wake to a life
still at the edge of ruins, a train snaking round the pit
to disgorge its passengers onto a platform, its length
overlapped in the fog of histories, like the long approach
to Athena’s throne, or the Via Appia, but paved over,
stairs at the end rising to the fences, which lead me
round the rim, walking into the low, autumn sun
pressing metallic foil to the bell towers of St. Paul’s
and Trinity Church, slowly lifting its head above rooftops,
stretching its fingers through streets, poking the Hudson,
seeming to search with a birdwatcher’s quiet caution
for a glimpse of the shadows it can cast but never catch.

First published in Loch Raven Review

My Jersey City

The sun rises from trees, its light
pooling under the leaves. But only for a moment,
then the wind shakes it loose, glinting along rails
as a train pulls out from Journal Square
passing a recess in the granite trench
where a ginkgo twists like a dancer of green grace
fixed in a precarious balance of revelation and mystery
which it passes on like love, never content
to stay in the same place long, and maybe changes
with each arrival, now billowing from smokestacks
off Pulaski Skyway, now falling through car fumes
in the wake of a swooping gull.
Its avenues through the swampy stench of mildew
bless even the collapsed docks rotting in shore water
bursting the terms of beauty and disclosure
with the plumes of fireworks at Liberty State Park.
It travels the same dark bridges as the pounding rain
reaching down to the roots where it settles and waits.

First published in Fogged Clarity

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