This Living Hand [excerpt]

Dean Young

 
It's not only the word roses
lurking inside neurosis or the fact
that most of my formal education
occurred in the midwest, so too
my summer job inhaling industrial
reactants should be considered.
It's an unstable world, babe.
Always an inner avalanche
as they say in receiving.
I'm sure if I'd gotten a shot
of Karl instead of Zeppo Marx
in utero, things would have turned out
differently. Instead, my mother
went right on eating lobster.
But where were we? . . .
 
Copyright © 2001 by Dean Young. Reprinted by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press. All rights reserved.

Poems by This Author

Ash Ode by Dean Young
When I saw you ahead I ran two blocks
Scarecrow on Fire by Dean Young
Everything is brushed away, off the sleeve
Thrown as if Fierce & Wild by Dean Young
You don’t have a clue, says the power drill


Further Reading

Related Poems
This Deepening Takes Place Again
by Emily Kendal Frey
This Living Hand
by John Keats
Poems about Roses
A Red, Red Rose
by Robert Burns
Go, lovely rose!
by Edmund Waller
I know I am but summer to your heart (Sonnet XXVII)
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
O, Gather Me the Rose
by William Ernest Henley
See How the Roses Burn!
by Hafiz
The Book of the Dead Man (Your Hands)
by Marvin Bell
The Sick Rose
by William Blake
The White Rose
by John Boyle O'Reilly