C. Dale Young

Anyone can kiss me. Anyone can pin my face with two hands and kiss me hard. As with much in life, it has taken me a long time to understand this. I study so many things: the way a hawk’s wings when stretched allow them to dry faster; the way the e [...]

Yes, the winds must have picked up, they must have slowed the motion of the car or the other one that missed the red light. Not strong enough, these winds, to have kept either car out of the intersection, but enough … When I go back, when I return [...]

The fog has yet to lift, God, and still the bustle of buses and garbage trucks. God, I have coveted sleep. I have wished to find an empty bed in the hospital while on call. I have placed my bodily needs first, left nurses to do what I should h [...]

Even the intangible can be broken. Maybe it would be better for me to say that things just go wrong, or that things aren’t always harmonious. At the start of Saint-Saens’ Danse macabre, a tritone, an augmented fourth, stands in for the De [...]

for Donald Justice (1925–2004) The late evening fog comes quickly in again, pours over the same San Francisco you once loved. Now, the silence is what I notice most here along the Great Highway, the flowers brighter now for lack of simple sunligh [...]

after Aaron Copland Dearest Heart, the leaves have stopped fluttering away from the trees, and the sky steadies itself above a city circled only by pigeons this evening. The street is absent its cars and their horns, silence placed on us now like [...]

The trees are dark and heavy, my love, heavy with the sound of the locust— the dead of summer has arrived. The lane scripts its old questions carefully down a canyon of trees. Green, the sunlight shifts and dims the credibility of things, [...]