Book of Hours: Poems Hardcover - 2014

Bereavement
Behind his house, my father’s dogs
sleep in kennels, beautiful,
he built just for them.
 
They do not bark.
Do they know he is dead?
They wag their tails
 
& head. They beg
& are fed.
Their grief is colossal
 
& forgetful.
Each day they wake
seeking his voice,
 
their names.
By dusk they seem
to unremember everything—
 
to them even hunger
is a game. For that, I envy.
For that, I cannot bear to watch them
 
pacing their cage. I try to remember
they love best confined space
to feel safe. Each day
 
a saint comes by to feed the pair
& I draw closer
the shades.
 
I’ve begun to think of them
as my father’s other sons,
as kin. Brothers-in-paw.
 
My eyes each day thaw.
One day the water cuts off.
Then back on.
 
They are outside dogs—
which is to say, healthy
& victorious, purposeful
 
& one giant muscle
like the heart. Dad taught
them not to bark, to point
 
out their prey. To stay.
Were they there that day?
They call me
 
like witnesses & will not say.
I ask for their care
& their carelessness—
 
wish of them forgiveness.
I must give them away.
I must find for them homes,
 
sleep restless in his.
All night I expect they pace
as I do, each dog like an eye
 
roaming with the dead
beneath an unlocked lid.
 
 
Memorial Day
Thunder knocks
loud on all the doors.
 
Lightning lets you
inside every house,
white flooding
 
the spare, spotless rooms.
Flags at half mast.
 
And like choirboys,
clockwork, the dogs
ladder their voices
 
to the dark, echoing off
each half-hid star.
 
 
Greening
It never ends, the bruise
of being—messy,
untimely, the breath
 
of newborns uneven, half
pant, as they find
their rhythm, inexact
 
as vengeance. Son,
while you sleep
we watch you like a kettle
 
learning to whistle.
Awake, older,
you fumble now
 
in the most graceful
way—grateful
to have seen you, on your own
 
steam, simply eating, slow,
chewing—this bloom
of being. Almost beautiful
 
how you flounder, mouth full, bite
the edges of this world
that doesn’t want
 
a thing but to keep turning
with, or without you—
with. With. Child, hold fast
 
I say, to this greening thing
as it erodes
and spins.

Kevin Young is the author of seven previous books of poetry, including Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels, winner of a 2012 American Book Award, and Jelly Roll, a finalist for the National Book Award. He is also the editor of eight other collections, most recently The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food & Drink. Young's book The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, and won a PEN Open Book Award. He is currently the Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English, curator of Literary Collections and curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University.