Acceptance Speech

This time I’m not going to say a thing

about deity. It’s not the blizzard,

it’s three days after. Trinkle from thawing

roofs, ruined crocus pronging through.

Ruin, I promise, won’t be mentioned again.

Trees, sure, still begging in the road, split

to the bole but this isn’t about the chainsaw.

A pruning saw will have to do. The puppets

aren’t hanging themselves in each other’s

strings. Everyone’s easily identifiable

beneath the funny mask. Somewhere in Oregon,

Mary has another month to go, she’s comfortable

in any position for thirty-five seconds. Lulu,

we know you’re in there but no one’s

blaming you for reluctance to come out.

Poetry is the grinding of a multiplicity

throwing off sparks, wrote Artaud

and look what that got him: toothlessness

and shock therapy. Your dad, who has the worst

teeth of anyone I know, once ordered eggplant

in a steakhouse. Do not order eggplant

in a steakhouse turned out to be more

than aphoristicly true. Do not spend a lot

of time in an asylum writing cruel poems

if you can help it, one Artaud is enough.

In Kandinsky’s Blue 2, there’s a shape

in two rows of shapes that seems okay

although to the right’s a capsized canoe

full of mathematicians, to the left a bow

about to launch the killer astrolabe.

By what manner is the soul joined to

the body? How about climbing a ladder

of fire? No thanks. On TV, a rhino’s

lying in some red dust, munching a thorn.

You wouldn’t think he could ejaculate

for half an hour straight, but you’d be wrong.

See that cloud, it might weigh 10,000 pounds

which is about average for a cloud.

Happy birthday, happy birthday to you.

Tony says Mary is always writing about the sacred.

Talcum powder, binoculars, this decimated

planet. I know, a promise has been made

but Tony’s been sick for years and no one

knows with what. Flax oil, bark tinctures,

corticosteroids. He’s not exactly someone

you’d trust to drive your car, but still.

Something awful’s coming, isn’t it?

Would it help if I said Amen?

Copyright Credit: Dean Young, “Acceptance Speech” from First Course in Turbulence. Copyright © 1999 by Dean Young. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press, www.pitt.edu/~press/.

Source: First Course in Turbulence (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999)