Skip to content →

Opal

It’s not that Monet cared that much about stacks of hay.

Your feelings will never change, you’ll just stop paying so much attention.

A whole summer’s songs go by, the whole house turns blue.

A friend will need some help carrying boxes to the curb.

So slowly you’ll reach into the pond’s reflection of your own face—as if reaching into your face!—the tiny fishes will brush your fingers like nerves made of water.

Someone else will have to be young enough to climb the scaffolding around the town hall to derange all four of its clock faces.

The same laughter will have to work the rest of your life.

A friend takes your arm in the woods, it’s darker turning back.

You point at an opal in a glass case and the person behind it is only too glad to let you see it against your skin but it’s someone else’s skin you want.

You didn’t get everything but you got a lot.

from Fall HigherFind it in the library

Copyright © 2011 Dean Young
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of Copper Canyon Press.

Published in Dean Young Poems

This program is supported in part by a grant from the Idaho Humanities Council, a State-based program of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this (publication, website, exhibit, etc.) do not necessarily represent those of the Idaho Humanities Council or the National Endowment for the Humanities.