Dean Young: Selected Recent and New Errors

My books are full of mistakes

but not the ones Tony’s always pointing out

as if correct spelling is what could stop the conveyor belt

the new kid caught his arm in.

Three weeks on the job and he’s already six hundred

legal pages, lawyers haggling in an office

with an ignored view of the river

pretending to be asleep, pretending

to have insight into its muddy self.

You think that’s a fucked-up, drawn-out metaphor,

try this: if you feel you’re writhing like a worm

in a bottle of tequila, you don’t know

it’s the quickness of its death that reveals

the quality of the product, its proof.

I don’t know what I’m talking about either.

Do you think the dictionary ever says to itself

I’ve got these words that mean completely

different things inside myself

and it’s tearing me apart?

My errors are even bigger than that.

You start taking down the walls of your house,

sooner or later it’ll collapse

but not before you can walk around

with your eyes closed, rolled backwards

and staring straight into the amygdala’s meatlocker

and your own damn self hanging there.

Do that for awhile and it’s easier to delight   

in snow that lasts about twenty minutes

longer than a life held together

by the twisted silver baling wire

of deception and stealth.

But I ain’t confessing nothing.

On mornings when I hope you forget my name,

I walk through the high wet weeds

that don’t have names either.

I do not remember the word dew.

I do not remember what I told you

with your ear in my teeth.

Further and further into the weeds.

We have absolutely no proof

god isn’t an insect

rubbing her hind legs together to sing.

Or boring into us like a yellow jacket

into a fallen, overripe pear.

Or an assassin bug squatting over us,

shoving a proboscis right through

our breast plate then sipping.

How wonderful our poisons don’t kill her.

 

-- First appeared in Poetry, July-Aug 2008