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The Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula (NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI via CNN) |
Night awakens us
to another life.
The sky kicks over
its bucket of stars.
Finitude, earth,
a river into trees.
After relations it is good
to stare at the moon.
Sad humans,
we start grasping
at something we can't see
and stay that way.
Me? I'm just
sitting quietly,
part of an immense,
mutilated universe,
The dented metals of the sea,
raptors lying in a long sky,
too many divorces,
too many blood panels.
Matter, anti-matter. There's
still a lot unaccounted for.
But your leaning into me
was a sleeping bird.
How extraordinary
that other people even exist.
in each other.
The moon
puts its beak in my eye.
I want you to tell me
I won't be alone.
—A cento of lines from two of Dean Young's (1955-2022) seminal collections,
Elegy on a Toy Piano, 2005, University of Pittsburgh Press,
and Fall Higher, 2011, Copper Canyon Press.
