1.20.15

What are we making with ourselves, our lives? What happens when you don't get to choose? Infinity keeps moving, even with pieces falling off, and something becomes of the remainder. Here it is done with words; a few poems from C. Dale Young. 



The Call

 in memoriam Cecil Young

I am addicted to words, constantly ferret them away
in anticipation. You cannot accuse me of not being prepared.
I am ready for anything. I can create an image faster than

just about anyone. And so, the crows blurring the tree line;
the sky’s light dimming and shifting; the Pacific cold and
impatient as ever: this is just the way I feel. Nothing more.

I could gussy up those crows, transform them
into something more formal, more Latinate, could use
the exact genus Corvus, but I won’t. Not today.

Like any addict, I, too, have limits. And I have written
too many elegies already. The Living have become
jealous of the amount I have written for the Dead.

So, leave the crows perched along the tree line
watching over us. Leave them be. The setting sun?
Leave it be. For God’s sake, what could be easier

in a poem about death than a setting sun? Leave it be.
Words cannot always help you, the old poet had taught
me, cannot always be there for you no matter how you

store them away with sharpened forethought.
Not the courier in his leather sandals, his legs dark and dirty
from the long race across the desert. Not the carrier

pigeon arriving with the news of another dead Caesar
and the request you present yourself. Nothing like that.
The telephone rings. Early one morning, the telephone rings

and the voice is your mother’s voice. No fanfare. Your
father’s brother is dead. He died that morning. And your tongue
went silent. Like any other minor poet, you could not find

the best words, the appropriate words. Leave it be now.
You let your mother talk and talk to fill the silence. Leave it be.
All of your practiced precision, all of the words saved up

for a poem, can do nothing to remedy that now.

Faced with the classic, even trite symbols of death and passing, the speaker struggles to hold on to any shreds of what he can do in the face of the knowledge, knowing it will fail. 

Fireweed

A single seedling, camp follower of arson . . .

Follower of ashes; follower
of the bleached-out, burned-out
cascade of buildings, lotfuls

of whitened soil speckled with debris
let down by a gutted church
still aspiring to an ether-blue sky

centuries gone; follower
of scripts apotheosized into smoke,
notes lifted into air by flames

that all but threatened the entire lane
with the silence we call a bed
of dirt; follower of the match,

the instigator here and abroad,
the matutinal magnifying glass
focusing light into unwitting

summer grass, into cruciform twigs;
follower of the caveat
ignored because it was too small;

follower of the fourth oldest dream --
the landscape burning and burning.

in memory of Amy Clampitt

I liked that this poem was originally in purple text. 

Cri de cœur

The trees are dark and heavy, my love,
heavy with the sound of the locust—
the dead of summer has arrived.

The lane scripts its old questions
carefully down a canyon of trees.
Green, the sunlight shifts

and dims the credibility of things,
and then the pond is a field,
weedy and green, weedy;

the hospital, dirty squares of light
against a background of trees
dark with the sound of the locust.

Sleeping god in an age of plagues,
give us the chance to use the past tense.
Let us, with the charity of middle age, lie:

"Yes, it was all so beautiful. . ."

It appears as though I have found all elegies, of a sort. Well, it was mostly on purpose, since that's the sort of mood I'm in, and they are all so alike. In the vein of "making and unmaking", death is rather stark, but not something we can escape (well, or easily).