Fade Out

				Winter 2019
		Fade Out
			The flashlight my sister swept across the heavens got no response either. When my brother leaves his lab, he’s still limping and our governor’s demanding funerals for aborted fetuses and where’s a fetus gonna get the scratch for that? So yes, there are dark shapes in doorways. Can’t be helped. Today, I found a chunk of amethyst with a face inside you could tell was willing to wait a another million years for its scream to come out so let that be a lesson. Ditto the same cuckoo that followed Tomaz out of China tries to follow me but gets slapped back in security and I don’t just don’t. Maybe Jay’s right that it all comes down to one untranslatable fragment of Parmenides. Like when a dead child is covered with petals or a goat receives a garland of bells. It’s a thin red thread that holds the soul to the earth. Visibility is a disguise. —Dean Young Dean Young holds the William Livingston Chair in Poetry at the University of Texas, Austin.