Al Young

Love Poem

Sometimes, like an ocean whose motion
taps into moon power alone, you turn to me.

With earlobes and eyes, mouth and nose;
with heat-seeking arms you surround me,

and with a wild silence you tell me things
you never would or could have known alone.

Yes, you, the oscillating, wave-like friend
of the world whose particles have traveled

so inevitably towards mine that sometimes
the moon forgets its moves, and the sea,

well, sometimes seas can be the last to grasp
what's finally going on. What goes on here,

in this house, in this heart, in this inexhaustible art
that ranks right up there with taxes, death and

time, is (how else to save, how else to put it) love.
I wade into an ocean-you, pulled and lulled by love.

THE PLUM SOFA

Nights of nights of filament by filament reliving
the tender surrealism of time poured from no radio
no photo no Armenia of moon or Luci (which means
moon in that quiet sky lowered into darkness and almond-
honeyed rose language no voice can match but thought
can burn or ignite alone or under the cool blue Colorado
sky dream gone going going) slow down and tell
stories in poetry of how her shyness fell when heated
with wine or kisses she'd allow herself to blossom somehow
to stretch out on that long gray-smoothing-plum sofa
in the livingroom of the sad red door precisely one block west
of his sweetly numbered Underwood days where he typed
all day and night the baddest stories and poems and letters
she'd stretch and spread and let her love come down like that
but never all the way just close enough to smile

SEEING RED

You always seem to get it all wrong about me.
Just like in the days back when you thought
you'd up and die if you chomped me down,
so you ate my leaves instead and wound up dead.
Now you think it's OK to keep me from dying,
so you actually poison me through irradiation.
"Where's your imagination? 'Where's the spirit
of the Aztecs, who grew me to death, named me tamatl,
and loved me for the very fruity berry that I am?
From Plato to NATO, the vegetable consciousness
of Western Civilization mineralizes its own
pockets; oil-cloth pockets so you can steal soup.
That growers in this nation would stoop
to chemotherapy to give me greater so-called shelf-
life may hold the answer to cancer, but it doesn't
do a thing for me. I like to salt and spice
your mouth up, then seed it all red with zesty juice
and yellow-green after-thoughts like the bright
ting-a-ling of love. You hear what I'm saying?
You hear what I'm telling you? Rather than right
those ancient wrong notions, you've motioned them on.
Like edible street gangsters now, rain or shine,
we don't die; we multiply. Tell Henry Heinz
we tumorless tomatoes constantly see the best minds
of our generations goosed, juiced, and pissed.

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©2000/2005 by Al Young