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Gary Young
will read with Morton Marcus at Johnson House
on November 4th, 2003 at 7 p.m.  |
Gary Young is a poet and artist whose books include Hands,
The Dream of A Moral Life, Days, Braver Deeds, winner
of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize, and No Other Life,
which won the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry
Society of America. He has twice received fellowships from
the National Endowment for the Arts, and in addition to
other awards he has received a Pushcart Prize and a
fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
He edits the Greenhouse Review Press, and his print work is
represented in many collections including the Museum of
Modern Art and the Getty Center for the Arts.
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SAMPLE POEMS:
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A sparrow preens its wings on a power line overhead, and
casts a filmy shadow
across this dusty road, a charcoal drawing erased and
re-drawn each time the
sparrow shudders or twists. The world is re-invented
endlessly. Every
landscape is a triumph of revision.
•
There was a total eclipse of the sun, and the light at the
beach turned
vaporous. The air chilled quickly, the wind picked up, and
in the weakening light a
young woman left her friends at the shoreline and walked
toward me. She
smiled, held a straw hat up to my chest and said, look.
Sunlight passed through the
tiny spaces in the weave, and I was covered with dozens of
tiny suns, all
shrinking to slivers against my skin as the moon slid
silently between us.
•
Since dawn, the dove’s melancholic repetitions have haunted
the air. Melodies
from childhood, oh, please not that. Some memories I can
feel in my body like
a bruise. Mothers walk by with their little ones, and the
dove keeps singing.
A mockingbird starts up on a branch nearby—it’s call and
response: the
pitiful piping of the dove, and the giddy exuberance of the
mocker. Their music is
a clairvoyance. Who knew I’d be whistling by now? Who could
have guessed I’d
be singing such a happy song?
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I thought I could save the boy. The world could be remade,
and the boy would
survive. Penance, prayer, the smallest gesture can change
the world. So can I.
But so can the birds yammering in the trees, and the trees,
and the wind that
moves them all around. The world is every promise and
possibility. Am I still
a father, he asks, now that I have no son? Oh, yes, I tell
him. Now more than
ever.
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Kitty smiled, pressed my hand against the fleshy knot in her
belly, and said,
it’s the child we always wanted, or as close as we’ll ever
get now. A
malignancy, not a pregnancy, was swelling inside her. She’d
caress it with her
palms, and as the tumor grew, she mothered it; she brought
it to term. One night
she woke with a fever, and I carried her into the hospital.
Her wasted arms and
legs made her belly seem even larger than it was. A woman
asked, are you in
labor? And she said, no. Then the woman asked, but are you
expecting? And she
said, yes.
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