To Those of You Alive in the Future

on this day in the past four syndicated

series involving communication with the dead

were televised and in this way we resembled

our own ghosts in a world made brief with flowers.

To you, our agonies and tizzies

must appear quaint as the stiff shoulders

of someone carrying buckets from a well

or the stung beekeeper gathering honey.

Why did we bother hurrying from A to B

when we’d get no further than D, if that?

On Monday, it sleeted in Pennsylvania

while someone’s mother was scoured further

from her own mind. A son-in-law smoked

in the parking lot, exhaling white curses

torn apart by the large invisible indifference.

The general anesthetic wore off

and someone else opened her eyes to the results.

In this way our world was broken and glued.

But why did we bother shooing away the flies?

Did we think we could work our way

inside a diamond if we ground more pigment

into the paper’s tooth, tried to hold fire

on our tongues, sucked at the sugars of each other?

Many the engagement rings in the pawnshop.

Many the empties piled at the curbs.

A couple paused on a bridge to watch

chunks of ice tugged by bickering currents.

One who slept late reached out

for one who wasn’t there. Breads, heavy

and sweet, were pulled from wide infernos

of stone ovens. My name was Dean Young,

I wrote it on a leaf. Sometimes

I could still manage to get lost,

there was no guidance system wired inside me yet.

Laughter might have come from a window

lit far into the night, others were dark

and always silent.