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Friday, September 11, 2015

from "Ready-Made Bouquet" by Dean Young

... Loving someone who does not
love you may lead to writing impenetrable poems
and/or staying awake until dawn, drawn to airy,
azure rituals of space ships and birds.
Some despairs may be relieved by other despairs

as in not knowing how to pay for psychoanalysis,
as in wrecking your car as in this poem. Please
pass me another quart of kerosene. A cygnet
is a baby swan. Hat rack, cheese cake, mold.
The despair of wading through a river at night

towards a cruel lover is powerfully evoked
in Chekhov's story "Agafya." The heart seems
designed for despair especially if you study
embryology while being in love with your lab
partner who lets you kiss her under the charts
of organelles but doesn't respond yet

later you think she didn't not respond either
which fills you with idiotic hope very like
despair just as a cloud can be very like
a cannon, the way it starts out as a simple
tube then ties itself in a knot. The heart,
I mean.

1 comment:

  1. This new off the cuff formalism hearkens back to O'Hara and Berrigan. Great detours and delicious metaphors, especially the end!

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