This clam doesn’t have the slightest idea
what’s about to hit it. Well, maybe
it does but approaches life with bemused
becalmed detachment and therefore death
is no big deal, not to be avoided or bewailed
even by boiling. Wide it slowly opens around
its secret vowel. Doubtlessly there is a grace
in resignation as there is a briny sweetness
in the clam. The delivery man rings
a second time then turns away. The bee
bounces twice against the florist’s window
then bumbles on. Baby quiets, not getting
what he wants, the rain moves out to sea,
the lava gobbles up the village, villagers
ox-carted to another island sector just as
the old ones did, it’s their cosmology.
Past and future seemingly resigned to
simultaneously, the lovers agree to see
no more each other, leaving behind drinks
undrunk and twisted napkins. The student
moves to the next blank leaving the previous
unfilled. So much life we cannot have or
find or repeat yet so much we had and found.
I’ve made this mistake a hundred times,
one thinks, preparing to make it again.
One day I’ll get rid of these expensive
painful shoes but not now, another says,
scanning her closet. Some things must resign
themselves to becoming something else,
champagne flat, the burning log ash,
after the crash the runner walks with a cane
but some must accept they’ll never change,
stained tablecloth never unstained,
mark permanent on the heart. You pick up
a clod to throw on the coffin lid but can’t
so turn away, dropping it in your pocket.
—Dean Young
Dean Young’s new book, embryoyo, will be published by Believer Books in 2006. He teaches halftime at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and otherwise lives in Berkeley.
