This piece had a difference of the surreal quality to it, a bit of a dream-likeness happening; its highly erotic w/ shocking images in places. I was a bit concerned when I picked Young, since he has sucha strong trademark style that it might get old too fast - glad to say, hasn't happened. So he starts out again w/ a familiar theme, loss, but he just touches on it (I'm noticing he likes to revisit certain pet themes and metaphors) and then a kind of "Warming her Pearls" thing is happening, you aren't sure where he's going, but the language is getting very sexy, w/out directly addressing sex.
miniscule splits, glutter and glister, sweet
feeding, sucking out, sweet, sweet, a third-beer
By the end of the 1st S, he starts to let us in on his point, bar life, more specifically the pick up scene. A man and woman are engaged in age old flirtation tactics, she's dangling her shoe playfully off the edge of her toes, he's using the musician card, though this seems to be a more high end bar in a posh hotel, so he's "chasing sheet music, Mozart". They go to a room together. More clues that these are mucky mucks: the paper electronic hotel key, she w/ pearls, he w/ "gold scissors shaped like an ibis, its beak the blades". I have those exact same scissors, no bearing on the poem, just sayin. The most striking images come near the end, and he gives us a bit of crudity, but he handles it just right and gives us a great finale:
...The brief squalls
force everyone under awnings, together
into archways. In a window, a slow-motion
smear of desire, struck and bluish, two
strippers want rid of something glittering
between their legs. Do what you want
with their cries as the crowd turns the corner
to the cemetery and suddenly song seems
sufficient, all the flowers making sense,
each a blaze, lips in blaze, tongues on fire,
"Come closer, closer, lie down.
How do you like to be touched?"
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