Michael T. Young
Three Poems
The Day the World Stayed Inside
Crouching around tables
or stretched over sofas and floor rugs,
people tell stories of famous storms
that shut down cities and left people in the dark.
This sparks tales of late nights in the kitchen
or leaning over a pool table in the basement
passing family gossip around like the last cigarette.
Fresh tea and coffee fill the rooms
with various aromas of clarity.
Then someone uncorks a bottle of wine
for measure against the long day ahead,
and predictions of the even longer night.
Although the heat clicks on,
a few still wrap themselves in blankets,
feeling a chill they can’t account for.
Others roll up their sleeves
sharing scars and memories of what it was like
to get in a bar fight over a lost bet,
or finding out that the blonde at the end of the bar
was still married.
Some learn for the first time where they’re ticklish,
others, that they have an affinity for Greek history
or tapioca pudding.
The family’s youngest, a girl in a green dress,
sits by the window toward the end of the day.
Through the afternoon, she watched a beetle
crawl up the glass. Now she watches darkness
press to the panes like a tide rising.
She counts stars floating into view
like distant crystal jellyfish, and imagines
the weight of all that water pressing down
and how one day the whole house
will rise on the buoyancy of its own light,
a blue whale surfacing to draw in one long breath.
The Game of Statues
Our eyes haven’t adjusted to the dark
that cloaks our monuments. Their granites,
marbles, and coppers flash with dappled stories:
a burning insistence in the lie of pure light.
It’s why visitors slow before them,
to catch themselves in a fall they mistake
for taking time to reflect, even as it all
washes through them as though they were glass.
Nothing catches. They leave unchanged.
Neither have our ears tuned
to the voices echoing in the chambers
where we celebrate what has been made
out of the lives of others, out
of the muscle and age of people
who have no name in the books
we cling to and hand on to our children.
We’ve played the game of statues so long
we’ve forgotten to take the next step,
or notice the night is a deep hard granite,
and the chisel is in our hands.
Forbidden Rocks
They weren’t in any of the usual places—
quarry or beach cliff or cavern,
but somewhere on the other side
of what everyone believed possible,
around the bend of a ribcage,
suspended under a skullcap.
Suspecting them to be lined
with crystal, geologists tried
every kind of hammer and chisel.
But their points all broke
or shattered, because nothing
is harder than their dead center.
Over their course surfaces
and through their hairline fissures
wind warped into an enchantment.
Not a song anyone called beautiful
but a spell that lured people
from the deep caves of the country.
They trekked to the capital
and erected a temple there,
a house to celebrate their new
monuments, icons of force,
idols of a will that never opens
to light or exposes itself to warmth.
—Submitted on 01/31/2021
Michael T. Young is the author of The Infinite Doctrine of Water (Terrapin Books, 2018), The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost (Poets Wear Prada, 2014), Transcriptions of Daylight (Rattapallax, 2000), and Living in the Counterpoint (Finishing Line Press, 2012), winner of the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. His poems have appeared in The Cortland Review, Main Street Rag, Off the Coast, Cimarron Review, Rattle, and other journals, as well as in a number of anthologies.
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Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993.
