cinquain

NOVEMBER NIGHT

Listen…
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
And fall.


Adelaide Crapsey

Shamanism 101

Shamanism 101

by Dean Young

Like everyone, I wanted my animal

to be the hawk.

I thought I wanted the strength

to eat the eyes first then tear

into the fuse box of the chest

and soar away.

I needed help because I still

cowered under the shadow of my father,

a man who inspected picture tubes

five out of seven nights,

who woke to breakfast on burnt roast

except the two weeks he’d sleep

on a Jersey beach and throw me

into the gasoline-sheened waves.

I loved him dying indebted

not knowing to what,

thinking his pension would be enough,

released not knowing from what,

gumming at something I was afraid

to get close enough to hear, afraid

of what I was co-signing. So maybe

the elephant. The elephant knows

when one of its own is suffering

up to six miles away. Charges across

the desert cognizant of the futility.

How can I be forgiven when I don’t know

what I need forgiving for? Sometimes

the urges are too extreme: to slap

on the brakes and scream, to bite the haunch

of some passing perfume, so maybe my animal

is the tiger. Or shark.

Or centipede.

But I know I’m smaller than that,

filling notebooks with clumsy versions

of one plaint, one pheromonal call,

clamoring over a crumb that I think

is the world, baffled by the splotch

of one of my own crushed kind,

almost sweet, a sort of tar,

following a trail of one or two molecules,

leaving a trail

of one or two molecules.

Bouquet

Bouquet

When Dean Young Talks About Wine

The worm thrashes when it enters the tequila.
The grape cries out in the wine vat crusher.

But when Dean Young talks about wine, his voice is strangely calm.
Yet it seems that wine is rarely mentioned.

He says, Great first chapter but no plot.
He says, Long runway, short flight.
He says, This one never had a secret.
He says, You can't wear stripes with that.

He squints as if recalling his childhood in France.
He purses his lips and shakes his head at the glass.

Eight-four was a naughty year, he says,
and for a second I worry that California has turned him
into a sushi-eater in a cravat.

Then he says,
This one makes clear the difference
between a thoughtless remark
and an unwarranted intrusion.

Then he says, In this one the pacific last light of afternoon
stains the wings of the seagull pink
at the very edge of the postcard.

But where is the Cabernet of rent checks and asthma medication?
Where is the Burgundy of orthopedic shoes?
Where is the Chablis of skinned knees and jelly sandwiches?
with the aftertaste of cruel Little League coaches?
and the undertone of rusty stationwagon?

His mouth is purple as if from his own ventricle
he had drunk.
He sways like a fishing rod.

When a beast is hurt it roars in incomprehension.
When a bird is hurt it huddles in its nest.

But when a man is hurt,
he makes himself an expert.
Then he stands there with a glass in his hand
staring into nothing
as if he were forming an opinion.

—Tony Hoagland, 2003

Aperture

by Gary Short

From behind the screen door I watch the cat
in the bunchgrass stalking at dusk.
With the pure attention of religion,
he waits for the skitter of a field mouse,
a shiver in an owl's dream.

The cat delivers his limp prey
to the chipped gray paint of the porch.
I step outside, not knowing
if I will punish the cat
or accept the mouse.

At the edge of the porch I kneel and see
the map of red capillaries
in the delicate mouse ear.

I lift it by the tail to toss,
but in the blink of a smug cat's eye
I feel a tug—an escape
back into life.

In the African journals, Livingston tells
of the charging lion that knocked him down.
When he was held in the lion's mouth,
the human body's trance-like response
was to go limp in an ecstatic giving up
that saved. To assume death

to stay alive.

A Confederate soldier at Antietam
played dead when his battalion was overrun.
for a moment he thought he was safe,
but to make sure, the Union infantryman
drove a bayonet into each body on the ground.

When I pick up the mouse
and it jerks from terror-induced sleep,
I feel all that fear
in a small heartbeat.

My panicked fingers let go
and the mouse slips into the brush where it may be
safe for awhile. Though the cat
is all tension now and ready
to pounce again. I shut him in the house,
stand on the porch and watch the first stars
burn holes in the sky.
Dark enlarging around me,
the pupil in a cat's eye.

"Aperture" by Gary Short, from 10 Moons and 13 Horses. © University of Nevada Press, 2004. Reprinted with permission.