Al Young

Editor's Note: Underscoring the importance of poetry and the literary arts, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on May 12th 2005 appointed Al Young as California's Poet Laureate. A well deserved tribute and recognition for an outstanding man of letters. Congratulations Al. All of us here at Asili celebrate with you.

SNOWY MORNING BLUES

in tribute to James P. Johnson and Langston Hughes

New York, you know, has its New Yorks,
Manhattan her Queens, the Bronx
keepers of the flames with all their names intact.
Now that's a fact. Upside it, though,
you'll put your heart and everything
you know or thought you knew of snow.

When Snowy Morning Blues plays James P. Johnson's
game of catch-me-if-you-can, you can.He could, too.
New York ain't no last word, you know.
Nothing's what it used to be. And you, the you who sees
out past the end of the world, this snow, this wee wind-
fall he fells us with under eaves the wa we all fall
under suspicion in detective movies. Blam!
Blame it on the blues, blame in on a blizzard.

Diamonded, grounded in its ice cream crisscross,
snow makes you take to the country again, harmonica in hand,
craving the guitar of a pianistic You-Gotta-Be-Modernistic
genius-you can't get into this. Let snow tell its own story.
Let the blues roll on. Let snow fall right on time this time
blue, blank, blackening the city-within-a-city christened
in Dutch: Harlem,Haarlem,
Haaaarrrrrlem.
Vermeer, beware.

SOLARIS

"Science-nonsense! We don't want to conquer space at all; we
want to expand Earth endlessly. We don't want other worlds; we
want a mirror."
—Dialogue spoken by Snouth
in the Soviet film, Solaris
(based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem)

Explore Earth infinitely, rock by rock, root by root,
inch by inch, hair by hair, pixel by pixel, tock by tock.
There was a way once to get back; not get even,
but to reach home without leaving the body.
Imagine the unsounded but fully heard voice
that clumps up within you, that fluffs into a hunch,
silver every time. If intimacy lit up like this,
all holiness could be speared and stuffed and mounted.
Thank God for invisibility, for the untraceable
trails we sink in, marking our journeys in electrical ink
upon mental score paper that reads us perfectly.
That thoughts are things is all the faith we need.
To think pure beauty, have it turn up in your arms
or at your feet or on your bourgeois walls means
business. To slow time down until the space between
noments stretches beyond the hours means eternity.
Inworldly gospel people who lean into the cloud
look for that uncloudy day. To others, matter matters,
Lothing else, and business is business. Explore?

WATER, FIRE, AIR,THE EARTH,THE WIND

In drizzly, gloomy, womb wet modes of light
rebirth begins. Its mood of candle-power, and her burn-
down melts whatever flamed before with peeling grace.
Like rain pop-speckling the roof at night, a garden wall
of frogs and well-flagged seeds, the days, twice lit,
begin their trip inside this moment-dawn.
No cyber-trail of fire works this show.

Tough skateboard kids in gritty Edgware Road
make their leaps in light as agilely as any banker might,
as mathematicians Alan Turing or Stephen Hawking might.
The differences they split now is how they'll weather-
watch and work their roomy territories.

Where financiers and brokerage cheats predictably hedge
their greedy bets against alerts, and where poets
of the infinitely uncrunchable cosmologize,
these wise kids see, and, seeing, jump. The only sun
they know lies under wraps of cloud, prediction, interest shifts
all odds. Unbeatable, candle warmth reconstructs
the room that water falls around, where all things new
start out; still safe, still buried, wet, adrift, aflame.

©2000-2005 by Al Young