Michael T. Young (3 poems)
Phantom Limbs
For years after 9-11, visitors to Ground Zero
photographed the hole. It was like friends coming
to point at the stump of my amputated arm.
The phantom limb aches every morning
I look out my window. Can these visitors
remember the Borders bookstore that stood here?
Does it matter some can only imagine
the Krispy Kreme was over there?
Or is it all the same if none of them recalls
a summer day at the fountain discussing
the subtleties of memory, or another day
spinning between the towers, dropping
to the ground, and looking up as their
monumental height bled and spiraled
in an urban version of the waterfall effect?
Such a simple reflex, pulling and twisting
images in the opposite direction, like memory,
where things receding grow closer and closer
until time reverses and the past crowds the future,
full of unwanted guests and ghosts, a mob
swarming the memory of my son on the day
he was born, his small hand clutching
my index finger, as if he was aware
it was the first thing he was capable of losing.
Salt in Water
Like the first photographic prints from paper
soaked in salt water, preserve an image in the retina,
or a current in the flow of seeing. Brush silver
over the residue of an event and offer up
a chalice of saline to starlight, mixing memories
with their furious wishes, risen from children
gazing out night windows. Both what is remembered
and what is hoped. My own recollection: a salt lick
chiseled like an owl. It capped a fence post and melted
in the hunger of lazy horses. That wisdom at the corner
of the pasture, seasoned its advice to the end of bitter time,
back to ancient Greeks who bought Thracian slaves
with the crystal, or Roman soldiers whose salt ration
was their salarium argentum, and is my bi-weekly “salary.”
But in every case, it’s war—in Perugia, El Paso—
thrones built from sodium chloride, or toppled,
battles lost or won from Virginia to the last turn
in the mind where salterns burn to recall a name.
That’s why a dash of sodium in the diet
sharpens the print in the brain’s history books,
and even Gandhi’s great soul soared as salt
from his hand, a lump lifted from the beach mud.
Held in sunlight, it blinded the British Empire.
Remembering that, seasons my present, where
hungry bodies sleep and fidget on park benches,
or I look down a pit that once was a library and will be,
in a year, a condominium. I remember, strengthened
by lifting a little salt, and a small glass of water,
raised to the sun, light through that mineral dissolved
in memory, in that liquid, fractured and spilled.
Souvenir
Peculiar to every bathroom in Utopia
is a sage dish of river stones and soap chips.
Visitors are surprised by the hotels
with their cracked mirrors and creaky doors.
Pipes rusting under the streets go unnoticed.
Although one has a sense of something,
like all a lover isn’t saying,
leeching from joints into soil.
Joists soften to a fleshy pulp in the rafters,
threshing the air with a sweet scent
assumed dispensed from the native plants.
Tours of the city leave a lingering expectation
of a symphony about to start. Returning home,
tourists are unable to describe what they saw
but wake in the morning quietly humming
a new psalm for every ache in the bones.
Michael T. Young's third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was published by Terrapin Books. His chapbook, Living in the Counterpoint (Finishing Line Press), received the 2014 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award from the New England Poetry Club. His other collections include The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost (Poets Wear Prada), Transcriptions of Daylight (Rattapallax Press), and Because the Wind Has Questions (Somers Rocks Press). He received a fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Chaffin Poetry Award. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous print and online journals including The Cimarron Review, The Cortland Review, Edison Literary Review, Lunch Ticket, The Potomac Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. His work is also in the anthologies Phoenix Rising, Chance of a Ghost, In the Black/In the Red, and Rabbit Ears: TV Poems. He lives with his wife and children in Jersey City, New Jersey.