The Decoration Committee

A poem telling the story of a man shooting a moose

is a narrative poem.

If the poem goes on for a long time and the moose

turns out to be his daughter who got screwed

by the lecherous, jealo0us gods and the man

then founds a city, it is an epic.

Many say the Age of Epic is behind us,

the rain falls upon the moose corpse

and the murderous, capricious gods seem done with us,

killed or wandered off, and, unattended,

unhouselled, we charge through the bracken

with only the burning hoof print of human love

upon us.  Perhaps the long poem you struggle with

is just a long poem as a big storm

need not be a hurricane.  When I was a child,

hurricanes, like battleships, were given

exclusively women’s name.  Advances

have been made and currently hurricane Bill

is rampaging through Jamaica, an island already

wracked with poor prenatal care.  There is still

so much to do.  Each is alone, shorn and bleeding

of lip, mouth crammed with feathers, hands full

of torn lace, the curtain rising on all

the people who murdered and loved each other

now bowing arm in arm.  A conductor appears,

balding, and the crowd disperses to cafes

to argue and woo.  How to know what next to do, where move, what does and doesn’t

belong here in a place we’ve been a hundred times

but never noticed the pictures of burning

buildings on the walls.  Oh, what was once

a forest is no longer a forest, what was once

a tree is now a wheel, A poem, usually shortish,

which begins, “When I was a child” or

goes on about clouds or trees or lost love:

woe, woe, etc. is a lyric poem.  The original

lyre was made from a hollowed-out tortoise shell.

From the tortoise’s point of view,

the lyric was a complete catastrophe

but it has done very well by humans although

I know of no studies concerning if and in how many cases

a lyric poem eases heartache by initiating 1.

The beloved’s return, the door flies open,

the bra unstrapped, the moose dappled

with dew and/or 2. A getting-over-it

happiness at just having written/read the poem

which is about misery in the old way

but also in a new way and then noticing

the pretty barmaid.  How little

we know of Sappho beyond the eloquent

snips of limb-loosening Eros.  Chervil,

a spice, is mentioned for its tende4rness.

Other examples abound.

Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods

on a Snowy Evening” is thought by some

to be about Santa Claus, by other

suicide.  Generally, the suicide people

have higher degrees.  Anguish seems endless.

The heart however is often frivolous

perhaps as a form of defense

akin to the gaudy coloration of the tender

poison arrow frog.  I am beautiful therefore

invulnerable is the message of its body.

In English, there appears to be no rhyme

for “orange.”  Many poems fill many books

and in this they resemble the records

of small claims courts.  One of the ways

new kinds of poems may be written

is by finding out what people agree is not poetry

and doing that.  Where are the timorous mortals

banged by gods?  Where are the trees and woe?

Ben Johnson, referring to a disease of sheep,

said that some subjects cannot be made poetic

but then along came the French.

After hours of voodoo drumming, everything

you do may seem like a poem.

Poems cannot be “fixed.”

If at the end only a few people are dead

and the rest mill about the fountains

as if waiting for a wedding, it is a comedy.

Who are the bride and groom?  Maybe me,

maybe you.  Who cares?  Let the doors

burst open upon worlds of light, dogs chasing

brooms, the moose out there somewhere braying

for its mate.  Is it not nearly enough to sway

to the invisible music, to watch the wrinkley

waters?  To feel within the heart the crushed ball

of aluminum foil?


by Dean Young