Lucifer

By Dean Young b. 1955 Dean Young

You can read almost anything

about angels, how they bite off

the heads first, copulate with tigers,

tortured Miles Davis until he stuck

a mute in his trumpet to torture them back.

The pornographic magazines ported

into the redwoods. The sweetened breath

of the starving. The prize livestock

rolls over on her larval young,

the wooden dwarf turning in the cogs

of the clockworks. I would have

a black bra hanging from the shower rod.

I would have you up against

the refrigerator with its magnets

for insurance agents and oyster bars.

Miracles, ripped thumbnails,

everything a piece of something else,

archangelic, shadow-clawed,

the frolicking despair of repeating

decimals because it never comes out even.

Mostly the world is lava’s rhythm,

the impurities of darkness

sometimes called stars. Mostly

the world is assignations, divorces

conducted between rooftops. Forever

and forever the checkbook unbalanced,

the beautiful bodies bent back

like paper clips, the discharged

blandishing cardboard signs by the exits.

Coppers and silvers and radiant traces,

gold flecks from our last brush,

brushfires. Always they’re espousing

accuracy when it’s accident, the arrow

not in the aimed-for heart but throat

that has the say. There are no transitions,

only falls.

Dean Young, "Lucifer" from Fall Higher. Copyright © 2011 by Dean Young. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press.

Source: Fall Higher (Copper Canyon Press, 2011)

Biography

Poet Dean Young was born in Columbia, Pennsylvania, and received his MFA from Indiana University. Recognized as one of the most energetic, influential poets writing today, his numerous collections of poetry include Strike Anywhere (1995), winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry; Skid (2002), finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Elegy on Toy Piano (2005), finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Primitive Mentor (2008), . . .

Continue reading this biography