Al Young

WINTER LEAVES

Sometimes you love someone
so much you have to leave them
alone with their memories of
how love's become whatever
it is & leave it at that, leave
it left in order to leaf it &
flutter in the wind the way leaves
leave trees & like trees leave
leaves; mute like light in a
rakish, unsorted sort of way.

Sometimes you retrace the cycles
of love &, surprised by fingertip
discoveries, you touch upon cycles
of love as incalculable as the inner
targets of tree trunks whose circles
are true & enfold the very way a rose
unpeels petal by petal into bulls eye
essence: a remembered space that
can't be so much measured as sniffed
in November, December, January when
tides, prices & expectations are on
the rise; nothing but frosty departure.

Hardly measurable, barely touched,
sometimes you love someone
so much you have to leave them loved.

FALLING ASLEEP IN A DARKENING ROOM

Blue, the most beautiful of afternoons
is to lie transfixed with pressure brought
to bear on your dozing zone, and then to
feel air being let out of the giant world,
a balloon big enough to live on but not live in
except perhaps to sleepers dreaming they're awake.

To lay you down to sleep with winter blowing
through rooms where you've been worrying too much,
run your engine's battery down to barely audible
palm-held miniature radio level. . . Shhhhh . . .

Now you can let laughter bubble out of silence
like kindergarten blobs of color flung against
emptiness, and let every unhurried passerby
become a painted shadow remembered in a slow dream
you always wanted to have, but haven't had yet,
not until now when, nodding, fading, you let go.

Everything you ever thought you were leaves you.
Alone, you wake up yesterday or maybe last week
or, fortunate, you fade back in, expanded again,
feeling virginal, refreshed - a new you not so blue.

AMERICAN TIME

Youknow you've come back home again
when they start snatching plates
right out from under you in restaurants
before you get to savor all your food;
there is no time, there just isn't time.
The country of mad hatters, this is
that; the Wonderland it took a mathematician
with li penchant for myths and nymphets to imagine
the way it truly is: Hello/Goodbye/Drop me
a line/Let's grab a bite/Give us a ring/
Damage estimated at six million dollars/
Instant replaymmes Square squared/Everything
you ever wanted in a beer and less/rushes
and rushes and rushes of early returns -
there is no time, there just isn't time.

Youknow you've come back home again
when you turn up at the office on Sunday
morning to find the trees that stood
in front of the building only yesterday
have been dug up and hauled away so clean
you think you've lost your mind. But what
about the stores shut down since you've been
gone and the buildings leveled and the whole
blocks excavated to leave you standing
frozen in your tracks trying to remember
in January what had been there in December?
And the neighbors who casually say, "Oh, hey,
the moving van'll be here Saturday, we forgot
to tell you we're pulling up stakes for Oregon."
Computerized dating, Disneyland waiting,
queues and cues and oolyacoos of twisty bebop
drop you constantly into to-be-continued
new waves of slaving variations on a theme.

TUNE

Say we were pushed to name a time
when rhythm didn't existthat
would be like trying to box
without making a fist.

Like footprints, there is no one beat
that change will not erase;
the earth ticks on yet holds its mold
in patterns that light space.

The love of being regular
is old as tides or sands
or being female once a month;
breath, heart thumps, drums or hands.

This time to which we dance our lives
is real down to our smiles,
our dyings, our talk, our years; the leaps
from stages into aisles.

©2000-2007 by Al Young