Time is screwed in these poems from poet and Classics scholar Elizabeth Marie Young. Screwed as in up, as in over, but also as in screwy or unordinary, anachronistic, strange—and in that old strangeness, Young makes time new. See how the ancient coercive powers of anaphora are enlisted as scalar pulsings that batter and then rebuild the numerologies of geopolitics, human history, the everyday of art and labor in “And the First Required Courage.” See how “such unthinkables as spring” in the decomposing telos of “Apocrypha” tumble through the air first as abstraction, propulsive season, then leopard, then land as a wild burst of yellow flowers, names of yellow flowers in a tenderly timed telling—erratic, iterative, and dear. –The Editors and Poetry Staff
And the First Required Courage
and the first required courage
and the second was like a lion
and the third had the face of a man
and the fourth was the sound of water
and the fifth caused mass migration
and the sixth was a satellite image
and the seventh was an act undertaken for profit
and the eighth hung in the balance
and the ninth was in revolt
and the tenth came in the clouds and every eye shall see him
the eleventh, given nothing
and the twelfth not yet perfected, dangling between the ragged
ribs of ordinary language that confer significance
and the thirteenth was extracted with a two-edged sword
and the fourteenth was repentant with a sword held in his mouth
and the fifteenth was the ocean, rising here, settling there, changing
living things and rhythms
and the sixteenth spins, heat swirling around
and the seventeenth has patience
and the eighteenth vast power given over all the nations—why not,
then,the morning star
and the nineteenth was a hoax—we’re on the side of facts
and the twentieth, the twenty-first, the twenty-second, twenty-third,
twenty-fourth etc. must shortly come to pass having once been
set in motion
Apocrypha
The savage shapelessness that’s crouched,
catching its breath, in the space you left
behind has decided to give birth to something
so unthinkable that when it barrels down the
cliff it has already decomposed. When it bites
you barely feel the mere conjecture of its tongue.
And yet, its solitary nature and the cunning
arrangement of words by which it’s been described
leave you with sufficient proof. Are you embarrassed
to proclaim it as a peerless destroyer of hosts?
Are you so timid, careless, famished, you’d blend
back into the snow, waiting for the perfect moment
to extol its gentleness? You’ll never extricate
yourself from such unthinkables as spring,
although the snow leopard caught on camera
by some insight, mood or urge, very green
and trying hard has put out leaves amid
the botched cries of “forsythia! forsythia!”