POEMS BY IVAN YOUNG
FROM A SHAPE IN THE WAVES (Columbia SC: Stepping Stones Press, 2009)

The Taxonomy of Want
The sun has baked the marsh mud
to a hard edge.  I smell brine on the air,
moisture on my coffee cup tastes of the saltof skin. I name the birds of morning.  You
first saw the Great Blue Heron and spoke
its name like a poem, Ardea herodias,and today I watch it through saw grass:
the slender neck, the streak of black
on the head, the slate grey sides, traits

you penciled carefully in a blue notebook
beside each name you collected.  I know
the habits of the Marbled Godwit that skirts

the beach and stops to name himself: “god-wit,
god-wit.”  He is Limosa fedoa in your tight script,
your small hands, your bent ring knuckle.

Even now I seek your commonplace
wanderings, to name exactly the emptiness
that you’ve left. I read your taxonomy—

Tringa solitaria, the Solitary Sandpiper;
Larus atracilla, the Laughing Gull—
until I lose the thread of things

and the thin “kree-eet” of the Least Sandpiper
blends  with the Oystercatcher’s piercing
“wheep,” then “pic-pic-pic,” echoed

in the wilted scrub and the morning is still.

Bar Magic
You drag your nail through the blister
where a cigarette burned too long, forgottenby the drinker who found something in smoke
and mirrors that so transfixed he let ash dangleto wood.  A woman next to you spins coins,
catches them deftly between her fingertipsand you can think only of how one night
your wife disappeared, cloaked herself in words,left through the trapdoor at the back of a marriage.
You know magic of late nights:  how two can touch,twine around each other in a slow dance
and with the slide of the hand down a back

the knot slips away.  You’ve held the hollowed
egg of your marriage out to her and said, “this is whole.”

You will levitate, after the scotch soaks in,
hover above yourself, play tricks with the world

The man chatting up a hooker is the Jack of Hearts
you place back in the deck. He will reappear

in the shuffle.  Even the bartender, cut neatly
in two by the stainless edge of the beer cooler,

can be made whole.  But you, you are sleight
of hand, host of misdirection and the quick palm.

You’ve forgotten real magic, how you transform
without wires, assistants, how the prestige holds power

only in believing the deception.  How can you bring back
what has disappeared unless you know it is tucked away,

has always been there, confined in a sleeve, like a delicate
bird?  You practice yourself in the bathroom mirror,

use banter to distract the woman who always wants
to know the story behind your illusions.  You could tell

her how you make yourself vanish, but you fear if she knew
the compartments where you hide, there’d be nothing to reveal.