Two Poems by Michael T. Young

The Baroque Edge

We think of people in the past
as stuffed shirts, stiff in confines
of etiquette and rules, but
Bach carried a sword
on his long walks. Handel
would have died in a duel,
except for a well-placed button
that deflected the blade. So
maybe there’s an edge to
The Well-Tempered Clavier
that we fail to catch, or
a crosscurrent cutting across
The Water Music and imperceptibly
drawing us, gently nudging us, like
a gesture of defiance made
toward the dark depths, out
at the edges where
the silence growls and paces.

*

Erased

I sit in the dark listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony.
It’s a night a long way into the new world.

I can see its outlines in how this last movement
is a prolonged diminishment, one instrument at a time

disappearing into silence, like the loss of so many things:
we hardly notice them gone until we can’t hear them,

like a friend moving farther and farther away into a distance
that finally is too remote for us to reach across,

or freedom to speak our mind dwindled by a word
here, a word there. And there goes another violin

sinking into the absence of what we believed in,
who we thought we were, a kind of people who

could defy every power contrary to us. What it meant
to be American. But here I am, in the dark, on a cold night

deep into the new country, listening to an Austrian composer.
Now the cost of the needed medicine or food

drives us to work so late, we’re always tired
and there’s only collapsing into a moment of exhaustion

at the end of a day, watching TV or listening to music,
until that last violin holds as long as it can the final note,

a melodic fragment that Mahler marked in his German script,
a notation meaning “completely dying away.”

*

Michael T. Young’s fourth collection, Mountain Climbing a River, will be published by Broadstone Media in late 2025. His third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. His poetry has been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. It has also appeared in numerous journals including I-70, Mid-Atlantic Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and Vox Populi.