3 Poems
Pat Younger
Patrick Younger lives in sunny, historic Lawrence, Kansas with his children and his cats. He frequents swimming pools and buys more books than he can read. He recently dropped out of grad school.
@Frontyardpat
ON THE UNITY OF BEING
I am the universe lonesome for itself.
I am the universe eating itself from a
paper bowl which is also the universe.
I am the universe driving the universe
down the universe south to the dentist’s
office. I am the universe scraping calculus
from the universal mandibular incisors. I
am the universe longing to see itself again.
I am the frightened universe scratching at
the universal door: let me in, the universe
is thundering. When I was a universe my
universe couldn’t put the universe down
long enough to notice me. Now my
yearning has grown into a universe.
I am the universe pushing its chin left.
This pine tree is the universe. Kansas is
part of the universe. I am the universe &
I wonder how often the universe wonders
about me. Someday I’ll be in a bungalow
out on the universe. At night I’ll hear wave
after universal wave crashing into the
universe & each will be you, O universe.
SONNET
This is the story of a man who one day
awoke to find he could only eat books,
though he tried and failed to return to
citruses, rice, fried fish, his old ways.
In place of carbohydrates and vitamins
the books filled the man up with beautiful
stanzas, paragraphs, pretty injuries.
He thinned and his skin got tough. He ate
the Russian realists and his eyes lost their
shimmer. He ate Shelley and his hair fell
out. He ate the Stoics and no longer
anguished. His teeth were bookmarks.
Book after book. He ate Capital and died.
DEPART FROM ME
— Gospel of Luke, 5:8
It’s like the tide this way: it waxed.
The quay was beaming while it lasted,
then it waned. I asked for more and more.
I begged to peel the clothes off every single
word he said. To smoke them like cigarettes.
Reveal the [ ] behind the veil. Began to
wonder can he even imagine what it’s like
to be a human being, much less a piss-poor
fisherman, I mean just look at him.
I sang fill me with thy gracious spirit at
the top of my lungs in the alley. Strip me
wholly, empty throughly. Felt every shadow
and every lithe stroke of wheat-golden sun
like a Raphael cartoon. Picture me haloed.
Picture me bearded, blue-tunicked, offshore.
Picture me on my knees, dick deep in tilapia,
Praying, seeking a safe return to my misery.
Every miraculous draught succeeds a dearth,
be it fishes or filth. Jesus’ healing of the leper
shows us chiefly his love for cleanliness. So
we made our own Gennesaret of tears and
kisses and bathed in it, abandoned home
like newborns, disciples of an outdoor god.
The sun and everything rising. Only rising.
O the sun. O we outran the dusk and settled
in like sand, as fluid, as flaxen, as free.
Jesus and me and the chokecherry trees.
But now I tell him to leave and he’s
jamming his feet into sandals, one at
a time, perched cranelike and he looks
so silly I can barely hold my anger,
keep the flame from blowing out
in the wind, so puerile. By summer
the blue jays throng in this town. Look.
There’s one outside the window now
