C. Dale Young

C. Dale Young was born in 1969 and grew up in Palm Beach, Florida. He earned his BS at Boston College, and holds both an MFA and an MD from the University of Florida. His work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 1996, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of The Day Underneath the Day (Northwestern University Press, 2001). His second manuscript, The Second Person, was a finalist for the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets and is forthcoming from Four Way Books. Young currently practices medicine, serves as Poetry Editor of the New England Review, and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College. He lives in San Francisco.

Proximity

I have forgotten my skin, misplaced my body.

Tricks of mind, a teacher once said: the man

with the amputated right arm convinced he could

feel the sheets and air-conditioned air touching

the phantom skin. There must be a syndrome

for such a thing, a named constellation of symptoms

that correspond to the ghost hand and what it senses.

This morning, I felt your hand touch me on the shoulder

the way you would when you turned over in your sleep.

What syndrome describes this? Not the sense of touch

but of being touched. Waking, I felt my own body,

piece by piece, dissolving: my hands, finger by finger,

then the legs and the chest leaving the heart exposed

and beating, the traveling pulses of blood

expanding the great vessels. The rib cage vanished

and then the spine. If your right hand offends you,

wrote Mark, cut it off and throw it away,

for it is better for you to lose a part than to lose

the whole. But I have no word for this phantom

touch, and the fully real feeling of the hair

on your arm shifting over my own as your hand

moved from my shoulder and out across my chest.

Desire makes me weak, crooned the diva,

or was it Augustine faced with his own flesh?

Whisper me a few lies, god, beautiful and familiar lies.

Torn

There was the knife and the broken syringe

then the needle in my hand, the Tru-Cut

followed by the night-blue suture.

The wall behind registration listed a man

with his face open. Through the glass doors,

I saw the sky going blue to black as it had

24 hours earlier when I last stood there gazing off

into space, into the nothingness of that town.

Bat to the head. Knife to the face. They tore

down the boy in an alleyway, the broken syringe

skittering across the sidewalk. No concussion.

But the face torn open, the blood congealed

and crusted along his cheek. Stitch up the faggot

in bed 6 is all the ER doctor had said.

Queasy from the lack of sleep, I steadied

my hands as best as I could after cleaning up

the dried blood. There was the needle

and the night-blue suture trailing behind it.

There was the flesh torn and the skin open.

I sat there and threw stitch after stitch

trying to put him back together again.

When the tears ran down his face,

I prayed it was a result of my work

and not the work of the men in the alley.

Even though I knew there were others to be seen,

I sat there and slowly threw each stitch.

There were always others to be seen. There was

always the bat and the knife. I said nothing,

and the tears kept welling in his eyes.

And even though I was told to be “quick and dirty,”

told to spend less than 20 minutes, I sat there

for over an hour closing the wound so that each edge

met its opposing match. I wanted him

to be beautiful again. Stitch up the faggot in bed 6.

Each suture thrown reminded me I would never be safe

in that town. There would always be the bat

and the knife, always a fool willing to tear me open

to see the dirty faggot inside. And when they

came in drunk or high with their own wounds,

when they bragged about their scuffles with the knife

and that other world of men, I sat there and sutured.

I sat there like an old woman and sewed them up.

Stitch after stitch, the slender exactness of my fingers

attempted perfection. I sat there and sewed them up.

Infidelity

The sun hovering a mile above the edge

of the Pacific, the wind rifling through the sea-grass…

Early evening of the longest day of your life.

Vast is this water, vast and incapable of solace.

Beside you, the wind and an empty space

to be filled with a fistful of sand.

If knowledge is understanding which questions

to ask, and wisdom is knowing which questions

to ask again, then what is it you seek, you

who have questions for which there are no answers?

There is a sleeping god in heaven.

There is a sleeping god who lets the loved one

secretly poison you in your sleep.

Even your shadow wavers behind you in the grass.

Your heart beats slowly in your chest, in your ears.

For consolation, you carry a fistful of sand.

You carry yourself over the dunes with a fistful of sand

and a newly discovered love of the second person,

your shirttails small flags left in your wake.