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Poems by Geoffrey Young
Got
Got by a player in straight sets yesterday
Which is, quite simply, and in four words,
Why I was born, by workmanlike attention
To the corners. Now it's Sunday, the day of rest,
A wholly fictional device. I feel disobediently
Miltonic and Methodist. I'm one with my character now:
Nasty, cold-blooded, febrile. My canoe is un-
Tethered, my banjo unstrung. Could be
A woman brings me luck, could be dim sum.
I might take a bike ride somewhere soon,
Maybe look you up on the way. Jerk us up
A couple of sodas with some kind of deadly drug
In them? I know I could be a great ellipsis.
I'm watching the bug of time crawl down my lifeline
With its stinger unsheathed toward that railroad crossing
With Fate. Looks like it might be a tasty accident.
But you know all shut eyes ain't sleep
And all goodbyes ain't gone. Write me a note,
Buy me a bottle. I'll go ahead and debone this
Language any way you'll read me. Everything's too quiet
Here at the Villa Cilantro. A vernal equinox of the soul.
Gray weather stretched ear to ear.
Seems my brain is in the hands of the Criminal
Analysis Division of the Police Department, anyway.
Don't mention this to what's her name, though, or
I'll have to bump you off. You know too much, see?
God is a concept, by which we censure our gain.
—Geoffrey Young
Pippin at Midnight
Outside it's 32 degrees below freezing
Inside it's 32 above as two
Feb becomes three Feb ninety-five
With Cuckoo on my lap watching Scottie
On fire against the Lakers.
After three quarters I off the tube
And head to bed, Bulls up 22,
Because it's not gonna get close enough
To have to check. Compete rhymes with
Athlete: the fluidity, the speed
Of mind--whether to pass, shoot,
Dribble or drive--always looking to create
Something on the fly. Night like this
It's enough to witness the prime
Of a player having a career year.
—Geoffrey Young
Envy Plays a Part
Jamie Lee Curtis in a yellow dress couldn't help herself.
It was I she wanted, but was I available?
As we sat around the campfire waiting to witness the arrival
of the vampires, she cuddled on my lap, and I held her close,
like a big baby, all of her eyes on me as I split my time
between a conversation on the subject of encaustic
and its impact on geometric abstraction and the feeling
of her flesh under that yellow cotton dress on a summer
night with her smile and its lipstick so inviting and smooth
skin on cheeks I would brush with a finger secretly gloating
to think of her amplitude, her puckish animation, her address
in the hills where I would finally get my chance to catalog
the various species of chaparral that drily hug the Hollywood
hillsides--manzanita, creosote, sage--all fire-resistant weeds,
really, staring down from their perches like wizened stars
from the silent era at the black cowboy boots worn by
boutique clerk, client, and neighborhood denizen alike
in the storefront dreamland avenues of Melrose, La Cienega,
El Rodeo, a full time casting couch in her den already inhabited
with a coach talking bit-part, voice-over, call back,
the right agent, with shooting to begin in Tunisia on Ramadan...
1991
—Geoffrey Young
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