• Home
  • Poetry
  • Archives
  • Past Events
    • Fall | 2012 Reading
    • Spring | 2013 Reading
    • Spring | 2014 Reading
    • Fall | 2015 Reading
    • Gallery
  • Submissions
    • General Submissions
    • The Paris-American Prize
  • About/Contact
  • Support
  • Home
  • Poetry
  • Archives
  • Past Events
    • Fall | 2012 Reading
    • Spring | 2013 Reading
    • Spring | 2014 Reading
    • Fall | 2015 Reading
    • Gallery
  • Submissions
    • General Submissions
    • The Paris-American Prize
  • About/Contact
  • Support


C. DALE YOUNG

The Master Plan

But memory is the greatest lie of all.  No, 
correction: the greatest set of lies.  Even the boy
who remembers his mother reading to him is
participating in lies.  So it is that to recollect
God pinning me to the hospital bed,

His hands cruel against my chest, His beard
dangling only mere inches away from my lips, 
the inability to move, the weight of Him 
crushing me against the bed as He whispers 
Who are you to question the Divine? is nothing more 
 
than memory, a lie.  The nerves in my neck and back
on fire, the prickly heat rippling through me like fire?
A lie.  It was nothing more than the nerves misfiring.
The metal ring, the titanium ring around my head, 
the halo was sadly, most definitely, not a lie.

One misfortune begets another.  And all stories
of origin are lies that beget more lies.  Three cracks
in the bone of the axis begets the halo.  The halo
begets the state of stillness, or is that begat?
The stillness allows the wings to erupt uncontrollably

from my back.  I like to think that this was the sequence
of events, injury-halo-stillness, that birthed the monster.
But that, too, is a lie.  The wings had made themselves
known years earlier, had erupted to full span and withered
away many times before.  Who am I to question the Divine? 
 
Who am I to return to the scene armed with words
and bookish learning?  I sit here now with the wings
about to rupture the tissues between my shoulder blades.
I want answers, meaning I want lies.  I want lies.
I muck around in memory and find only lies.



21   The Paris-American

Picture
C. Dale Young is the author of three collections of poetry.  His most recent is Torn (Four Way Books 2011).  He practices medicine full-time and teaches in the Warren Wilson College
MFA Program for Writers.  He is one of the 2012 Poetry Fellows of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.  He lives in San Francisco.

   
   Next week's poet:

 Alex Dimitrov
Picture
  The Paris-American
  Copyright © 2022 The
Paris-American
   About • Contact • Submit • Archives • Support