The Mission, Kevin Young
Sep. 24th, 2009 06:46 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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greatpoetryThe Mission
Kevin Young
Back there then I lived
across the street from a home
for funerals -- afternoons
I'd look out the shades
& think of the graveyard
behind Emily Dickinson's house --
how death was no
concept, but soul
after soul she watched pour
into the cold
New England ground.
Maybe it was the sun
of the mission,
maybe just being
more young, but it was less
disquiet than comfort
days the street filled with cars
for a wake --
children played tag
out front, while the bodies
snuck in the back. The only hint
of death those clusters
of cars, lights low
as talk, idling dark
as the secondhand suits
that fathers, or sons
now orphans, had rescued
out of closets, praying
they still fit. Most did. Most
laughed despite
themselves, shook
hands & grew hungry
out of habit, evening
coming on, again --
the home's clock, broke
like a bone, always
read three. Mornings or dead
of night, I wondered
who slept there & wrote letters
I later forgot
I sent my father, now find buoyed up
among the untidy
tide of his belongings.
He kept everything
but alive. I have come to know
sorrow's
not noun
but verb, something
that, unlike living,
by doing right
you do less of. The sun
is too bright.
Your eyes
adjust, become
like the night. Hands
covering the face --
its numbers dark
& unmoving, unlike
the cars that fill & start
to edge out, quiet
cortège, crawling, half dim, till
I could not see to see --
Kevin Young
Back there then I lived
across the street from a home
for funerals -- afternoons
I'd look out the shades
& think of the graveyard
behind Emily Dickinson's house --
how death was no
concept, but soul
after soul she watched pour
into the cold
New England ground.
Maybe it was the sun
of the mission,
maybe just being
more young, but it was less
disquiet than comfort
days the street filled with cars
for a wake --
children played tag
out front, while the bodies
snuck in the back. The only hint
of death those clusters
of cars, lights low
as talk, idling dark
as the secondhand suits
that fathers, or sons
now orphans, had rescued
out of closets, praying
they still fit. Most did. Most
laughed despite
themselves, shook
hands & grew hungry
out of habit, evening
coming on, again --
the home's clock, broke
like a bone, always
read three. Mornings or dead
of night, I wondered
who slept there & wrote letters
I later forgot
I sent my father, now find buoyed up
among the untidy
tide of his belongings.
He kept everything
but alive. I have come to know
sorrow's
not noun
but verb, something
that, unlike living,
by doing right
you do less of. The sun
is too bright.
Your eyes
adjust, become
like the night. Hands
covering the face --
its numbers dark
& unmoving, unlike
the cars that fill & start
to edge out, quiet
cortège, crawling, half dim, till
I could not see to see --
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no subject
Date: 2009-09-24 10:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-24 11:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-25 03:30 am (UTC)Thank you for posting this---I was just reading it earlier at work (Emory Library) in the new issue of Poetry.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-24 10:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-24 11:19 pm (UTC)