Birds that Migrate
I love the idea of how far they travel,
their ability to find their way over such distances
impresses those of us who tend to stay put.
And yet their noncommittal ways are unsettling.
How it seems as if they always have a bag packed
and ready to go. So, I feel a need to hold back,
to keep something of myself secret, just in case
I wake to find the other side of the bed cold
and their part of the closet clean. We never really
came to know each other, both of us long ago,
elsewhere, imagining how much better
life would be if the other were here.
*
Market
What is the price of a past I wondered
as we walked long aisles of crafts and antiques
dusted in what seemed an even more
antique light, history’s discards stacked on tables,
in stalls, beside old lamps, bowls and plates,
coins and stamps spread among clocks, cabinets,
chests, and racks of books. As we browsed
these prized marketable memories, we
nibbled Dutch cakes, cookies, brittle, and jerky.
Here we paused at a table of rings.
Rows of silver circles, knobbed and knotted
with different designs and images. My daughter
fished out one with a mushroom, reminder
of Alice coiled in smoke rings of Wonderland.
My son discovered a sleeping dragon.
I thought of the name of this old farmers market:
Green Dragon. When young and growing up
not far away, I imagined it a place of fire and danger,
and a gold burning light, the heat of a magic
that could transform anything into a shield
against different kinds of cold. In the ‘50s
it was the site of a cold war exercise called
“Operation Disaster.” Patrol planes strafed
the parking lot targeting people with fake bombs,
emergency personnel tended the fake wounded,
and a crowd of thousands gathered to see
who wouldn’t make it. But like a movie,
even the dead escaped alive. Now, among
descendants of the survivors, I sorted
through rings wanting to find something
meaningful in the heaps, something
I could see stamped there in the image
on its metal, even if I couldn’t name it. But
there was nothing that meant enough, and
we left for the long drive home, everyone else
content with what they found and carried away.
It was autumn, trees along the interstate
had turned yellow. The road climbed up
through a valley, lifting us toward the sunlight,
its gold threads cross stitched by birds flying
from tree line to tree line, until the air became
a curtain of gold and I looked up into it,
feeling myself rising into its radiance.
*
The Shapes of Loneliness
At first I think of footsteps
echoing down an alley or hallway,
a door clicking shut, maybe even
the sound of clippers snipping a bush.
Some isolated moment. But
it’s various, and even highly textured
like a scallop shell, ridges segmenting
space into discrete feelings,
separate ideas of how things
should have been before life split
into you and me, the time before
and the time after a friendship,
a marriage, a life. Now what’s left
retreats into the spiral recess
of a nautilus, so even when found
on a beach among crowds
of other shells, what can be heard
in any one of them is the distance
that can never again be traveled.
*
Michael T. Young’s third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. His previous collections are The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost and Transcriptions of Daylight. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. His chapbook, Living in the Counterpoint, received the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. His poetry has been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. It has also appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals including Pinyon, Talking River Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Vox Populi.
