If you came this way

And what you thought you came for

Is only a shell, a husk of meaning

From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled

If at all. – T.S. Eliot (The Four Quartets)

The car stereo plays Jeremy Irons reading

Eliot's Little Gidding and I’m moved

to tears in summer morning traffic.

And that is what poetry is for. Driving

past malls and office parks on Ring 1,

Monday after a two-week holiday, death

is with me in the sunlight, shining

down through hours and eons on forests,

highways, the hoods of cars and my forearm.

There will be time for work, time

for the shopping. But what of the evening

with the photograph album?

A candle burns on a table on a winter morning

before dawn. Your dead friend waits

by the river where past and future meet

and snowdrops and hellebores plot

their slow way back from oblivion.

If we cannot move like this in time, all is lost.

Cantilever

Every woman I’ve ever been with eventually found me impossible.

For instance, there was that time Maggie wouldn’t take twenty dollars

while driving down Lyndale in her red Jeep. I threw it out the window.

“If you don’t want it,” I said, “I don’t want it either.”

She went back for it because twenty dollars was a lot of money in 1996.

Another woman told me I seemed like the kind of guy who needed

to spend a lot of time alone, and watching the evening news

was unusually important to me. When I finally managed to stay ten years

with the same woman, she said our relationship only worked

the way a cantilever bridge does: It takes a lot of anchoring

on one side or the whole thing comes crashing down.

Again today, I am reminded the world does not revolve around me

and count my breaths until I can hear birds in the yard,

see sky beyond the trees. I smell an impossible ocean,

and reach to touch the horizon in this almost life-sized world.

______________

David de Young was born in Illinois and received a BA in English from Grinnell College. He

wrote about live music for many years in Minnesota, then moved to Finland in 2012 where he now lives as an expat with his wife and two daughters. More @daviddeyoung & daviddeyoung.com.