By Kevin Young
Crashing
again—Basquiat
sends fenders
& letters headlong
into each other
the future. Fusion.
AAAAAAAAAAA.
Big Bang. The Big
Apple, Atom’s
behind him—
no sirens
in sight. His career
of careening
since—at six—
playing stickball
a car stole
his spleen. Blind
sided. Move
along folks—nothing
to see here. Driven,
does two Caddys
colliding, biting
the dust he’s begun
to snort. Hit
& run. Red
Cross—the pill-pale
ambulance, inside
out, he hitched
to the hospital.
Joy ride. Hot
wired. O the rush
before the wreck—
each Cadillac,
a Titanic,
an iceberg that’s met
its match—cabin
flooded
like an engine,
drawing even
dark Shine
from below deck.
FLATS FIX. Chop
shop. Body work
while-u-wait. In situ
the spleen
or lien, anterior view—
removed. Given
Gray’s Anatomy
by his mother for recovery—
151. Reflexion of spleen
turned forwards
& to the right, like
pages of a book—
Basquiat pulled
into orbit
with tide, the moon
gold as a tooth,
a hubcap gleaming,
gleaned—Shine
swimming for land,
somewhere solid
to spin his own obit.
Kevin Young, "Cadillac Moon" from To Repel Ghosts. Copyright © 2001 by Kevin Young. Reprinted with the permission of Zoland Books/Steerforth Press.
Source: To Repel Ghosts (Zoland Books, 2001)
Poet Bio
Kevin Young was born in Lincoln, Nebraska. He studied under Seamus Heaney and Lucie Brock-Broido at Harvard University and, while a student there, became a member of the Dark Room Collective, a community of African American writers. “I feel like a poem is made up of poetic and unpoetic language, or unexpected language,” Young said in a 2006 interview with Ploughshares. “I think there are many other vernaculars, whether it’s the vernacular of the blues, or the vernacular of visual art, the sort of living language of the everyday.” For roughly a decade, Young was the Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English and curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University. Young is the poetry editor of the New Yorker and the director of New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
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