Joseph J. Capista
Seven poems into the third section
of Young's sixth collection, something
once-liquid and judging by scent alone
very degreasing saturates the margin.
It's the sheen of dirty swimming pool.
And it's preserved right here on acid-
free paper which, insisted my high
school art teacher, was otherwise so
clean when new it functioned nicely
as either plate or wound-dressing.
He'd say the paper was asking for it.
Whatever happened happened slowly
and beneath a sink or in some space
the shape of utility. After "Lemon Garlic
Duck," the stain creeps closer to line
breaks but because the lines employed
by Young are relatively short—thirteen
syllables, max—it never hits the text.
I have perhaps misrepresented reality,
as this occurs on only odd-numbered
pages; even-numbered pages, the stain
apprehends line beginnings, which do
not typically introduce a new syntactical
unit and are uniformly left-justified.
How difficult it is to say one true thing.
In time, the suspension of disbelief
proves burdensome to readers, as each
page represents so convincingly time's
very accumulation that one cannot
prevent one's mind from the pursuit
of one's own death, which benefits
me as a person but not as an artist.
I have perhaps misrepresented surreality.
But if in my right hand I hold the spine
and place on the back cover my left
thumb beside the blurbs Joseph Parisi
has declared “among the foremost
depositories of demented prose today,”
bend, then release the pages one-by-one
as one might a flip-book, the stain recedes
until I reach the already-read portion
of the text and the margin becomes what
the online bookseller must have imagined
when he or she labeled this item "clean,"
a joke involving a mild household abrasive
and of which I am the butt. Except that
"Stafford's typewriter" appears to be
written disproportionally large on page
thirty three, way bigger than this type.
But flip fast enough and one might easily
overlook such sundry marginalia and come
to rest on that epigraph by Kenneth Koch
about the human-brain’s proclivity for song
and the bird-brain’s proclivity for explanation.