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Elegy on Toy Piano

By Dean Young

For Kenneth Koch

You don't need a pony
to connect you to the unseeable
or an airplane to connect you to the sky.

Necessary it is to love to live
and there are many manuals
but in all important ways
one is on one's own.

You need not cut off your hand.
No need to eat a bouquet.
Your head becomes a peach pit.
Your tongue a honeycomb.

Necessary it is to live to love,
to charge into the burning tower
then charge back out
and necessary it is to die.
Even for the trees, even for the pony
connecting you to what can't be grasped.

The injured gazelle falls behind the
herd. One last wild enjambment.

Because of the sores in his mouth,
the great poet struggles with a dumpling.
His work has enlarged the world
but the world is about to stop including him.
He is the tower the world runs out of.

When something becomes ash,
there's nothing you can do to turn it back.
About this, even diamonds do not lie.

Poet Bio

Black and white headshot of poet Dean Young.

Poet Dean Young was born in Columbia, Pennsylvania, and received his MFA from Indiana University. He has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College, and the University of Texas-Austin. Influenced by the New York School poets, Young often uses the tools of surrealism and collage in his poetry. In an interview with Jubilat, Young spoke of the centrality of misunderstanding in his poetry: “I think to tie meaning too closely to understanding misses the point.”

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