Scraps
I throw on a trench coat and tuck
my pen inside the breast pocket
only to pull out an old ticket stub for Paris
or the birth plan of our first child,
the day dissolved into another lifetime,
my fork slicing a square of foi gras
in the Crémerie-Restaurant Polidor,
bumping elbows with the ghosts
of André Gide, Valéry and Joyce, or turning
from the Palazzo Vecchio toward the Arno
wondering if this might be a corner
where Dante paused to consider his Beatrice,
or staying awake the 27th straight hour
to talk my wife through her next contraction,
as today I talk myself through the monotony
and my failure to discard and organize,
leaving scraps tucked away like receipts
of a life lived in reckless gratitude.
Michael T. Young has published three collections of poetry: Transcriptions of Daylight, Because the Wind Has Questions and, most recently, Living in the Counterpoint. He received a fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and was twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He received the Chaffin Poetry Award and was runner up for the William Stafford Award. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in print and online journals including Coe Review, Fogged Clarity, Iodine Poetry Journal, The Potomac Review, and The Raintown Review. His work is in the anthologies Phoenix Rising, Chance of a Ghost, In the Black/In the Red and forthcoming in Rabbit Ears: TV Poems. He lives with his wife and children in Jersey City, New Jersey. www.michaeltyoung.com
