One writing assignment I sometimes give student poets asks that they write a poem based on a magazine that they read regularly — articles, columnists, photos, ads, classifieds, front and back covers, the works.
– Al Young
 
           
1/
You might think us crazy to shoot
pictures of what surrounds and flattens
year upon year: a good old lazy way
to look and view the when and why
of how life goes around and comes around
to kiss or hug or pass you by or bite you
in the ass. As she makes her rounds,
time squares life away. If in a snapshot
you spot a box of unsorted socks that long
to match, you know how they need to dance.
2/
Everything takes place in the background,
the field, where worlds recede, where seams
rolled inside-out sweat imagery. Like shirts,
like skirts, like tents and napkin pen-and-ink
ideas. the sketchy look of time takes shape
as form, and all forms die. We shoot to save.
Al Young
© 2008 by Al Young
In memory of Bess Mason Ivory, 1919-2008
From Hutchins Intermediate days you checked
to see how I was doing at that school.
You and Marcellius did this, I suspect,
to keep our teachers playing by the rule.
Back then the Parent-Teacher thing was big.
I’m talking 1950’s, back when Ike
was President. Marcellius knew how twig
and branch connect. You, too. You two were like
a substitute, a mom and dad who showed
on visiting night to speak on my behalf.
My own folks lacked the time or, maybe slowed
by circumstance and children, lacked the staff.
But you, sweet Bess, you looked out after me.
Love grafts me fast now to your family tree.
Al Young
© 2008 by Al Young
for Gloria Vando
Slanting, light just won’t ignite
just anywhere: One sun at least
slung over one shoulder should trump
all slowed blue bowls of sky.
For light to slant we need a slide
to slip down, some tilting blinds,
sly trees, slow cows, some cloud.
Whose days and nights don’t lean?
The open-surgery gloriousness
of light laid out (neither patient nor
ethereal) shouts out the secret
Jesus, Buddha unmuted, and the Tao.
Al Young
Copyright © 2008 by Al Young
Marina Swirling Clouds      Gloria Vando
As time encircles and recycles itself,
mirror likenesses thicken and fog up.
If you have trouble finding yourself,
start looking elsewhere. The sky –
not only is it not the limit, it opens
and dares you to look up who you are.
Mountains and mountains and mountains
– they’re you. Great Lakes you take
to be out there someplace look like you,
splash and churn and shine like you.
The world beyond washed flesh is you.
Light dries your eyes; one blink can melt
illusion, dissolve the frame that says:
“I look at you and see no evidence of me.”
Al Young
Copyright © 2008 by Al Young
Listening to our Winter Soldiers
May we speak clearly here may we talk
about poising ourselves on the border
between Kuwait and Iraq with the voice
of President Bush screaming into our ear
that Saddam Hussein and his evasive weapons
of mass destruction send us house to house
in search of any insurgency that will lead us
to the man of the house get him out of bed
and sometimes we catch them exposed
in their night garments which was embarrassing
even though eight out of ten times families
this is all they were families not insurgents
so a lot of these raids were not productive
we were going in there disrupting their lives
shoot everybody an old man a few children
and a woman we do not know who the enemy is
but they do know who we are so if the US hadn’t
been there my daughter would still be alive then
the majority of US soldiers do not fit in we do
not fit in most of us are not Muslim we are told to give
these people democracy and the bottom line most
US soldiers aren’t seen as peace-keepers but as invaders
animosity growing the solution to remove us and
ourselves from Iraq so now the message to Congress
you can stand with Bush or you can stand with the American
people deploy improvised explosive devices security
element casualty development point look for weapons
look for literature in every closet you’re looking for
even though you can’t read Arabic bang a sledge hammer
in a wall to make it sound like an explosive soften
them up for interrogation the majority of prisoners
in the wrong place at the wrong time sometimes
they got turned in because of family feuds thinking
we’ll put an end to war the way Buffy Sainte-Marie’s
“Universal Soldier” of your green Chapala days
the world flaring up in flames hate-ignorance ignites
new energy splashing into our world where you kill
the mother by shooting drive-by into a moving car
by shocking three surviving daughters fatherless
Al Young
Copyright © 2007 and 2008 by Al Young
Here in September already you feed
on lean November light, world at your feet,
the summer of your needy slowing shows.
So where if anywhere does autumn fit?
What do we harvest now that time is short?
How can mute light affect the ways we think?
The light and the dark: fall, a falling, equinox.
In San Francisco light the subtlety of change:
about a two-week shift from one to the other.
Some people will get sick during this time,
people often die at dawn or at dusk: transition –
a good time to reflect, reorganize or focus
on sadness (seasonal affective disorder) looking
backward or forward toward winter and hibernation,
where what you see going on sometimes
you really don’t want to look at or feel.
Full fall. How do you work with this? West and
the setting sun. Tune in what’s going on
in nature. Eat seasonally. Farmer’s market.
Not too much fruit anymore, but peppers, beets,
carrots, root veggies. What’s growing, what’s ripe?
Fruit ripens to root: the clue to what will grow
back into the body as plant; herbal, tonics,
digestive, muscular-skeletal, liver, immunity.
Light freezes dark, soft tendrils harden, a mattress
of sky turns, leaves smother the dew that piles
upon your planted summer loves. You bless daylight.
Al Young
 Copyright © 2007 and 2008 by Al Young
Rhae Lynn Barnes, Editor
“Why can’t these so-called poets just stick to writing poetry
and leave politics alone?”
– Michael Savage, radio talk show host (with reference to Al Young)
In the throes of criminal conspiracy,
in this dire hour, plum blossoms
push me back into pink chambers:
women, interrogators. Some strip
in front of Muslim men, then stand above
them to let their menstrual blood drip
onto captives’ drained faces. True or false?
No waltz of flowers, no gum-tree flower
trumps this sick misuse of flora and genus.
Torture of the landscape remains as American
as Billie Holiday’s strange fruit of lynch mob
justice. Dispensed with a callused hand,
with pride, such justice melts the polar ice
and caps the land with life-canceling poisons.
What on earth goes on here, Marvin Gaye?
Al Young
Copyright © 2008 by Al Young
Click to animate avatar of Al Young with the Dartanyan Brown Trio
Dartanyan Brown, bass | Jorge Molina, piano | Sly Randolph, drums
after Yip Harburg & Vernon Duke
It was here in that one-time, one-step, lighted blue
of Paris at ease, close to the Cluny, in splendid,
straight-up noontime shadow that your slow and
measuring eyes met more than their burning match.
The smooth warmth of your whisper along my neck,
the nappy back of it, where you’d peeled back
its soft, excited collar to tell me everything you’d learned
or discerned in a city where love and prices flirt.
A product of standstill winters, sudden summers, sultry
prejudice, and heartland steak-and whiskey afternoons,
you’d blown in from the States, an orphan of the arts –
Mary Cassatt, Josephine Baker, Mary Lou Williams,
Jean Seberg. What breathlessness overtakes me here?
Brushing and combing out memories of your touch,
in a season as uncertain as coastal fog moving inland
from the loveless edges of that country we’d both fled,
I shiver. Whom could we run to if not one another?
Back home we knew what it was like to be the other –
displaced, despised, imprisonable. We watched and fought.
The colors of loss deepened. Yearning to break free,
unconsciously American, we counted our chickens, certain
that the ships we’d always banked on would sail in.
In Paris, our adopted country of each other’s arms,
whose borders blurred all time, all common market sense,
we saved the slow but steady squeeze of night, of time,
the way it smothered darkness, the way it mothered light.
The April of your frightened French was like that, too;
you had no words for holiday tables, for chestnuts in bloom.
Parisian light, like light at home — Detroit, Des Moines –
lit up your waifish eyes. I said, “Think twice before you speak.”
Over here you mostly knew the blues; rue rhymed with blue.
There couldn’t be too much light, too much touch.
Al Young
© 2001, 2006, 2008 by Al Young
 Animation and design
© 2008 by J.J. Webb
“Washington and Hollywood spring from the same DNA.”
– Jack Valenti
The unclocked cruelty of time,
saudades: a yearning for yearning.
That everything you ever wished
or cared for sinks or disappears
tells time where it can go.
What you’ll get isn’t what you see
at all. If Southern California goes
the way of Santa Ana, over 700 homes
burnt to the ground from San Diego
to the Mexican border, the winds fueling
wild fires in the form of global climate
change: fires burn faster than ever before.
New flooding in New Orleans leaves water
waist-high in certain streets. The rich
will lose their homes in California, the poor
go down in Louisiana. What do we do?
Where do we go from here? What works,
what loves? Who, in nighttime operations,
can win when nooses make the news?
You know the lucid look of it: the sheen,
the products pitched and tossed like
lakefront huts in moody, wind-washed nights,
a storm antithesis to why you live offshore.
The cruelty of time melts down to this:
You lose all track of you and you and you.
You do forget how still time stands still
the very minute you’re no longer in it.
Time knows it’s just a big old funky fake.
Al Young
Copyright © 2008 by Al Young
