Congrats from Bridget

It’s graduation day here at Poem Elf! Our guest poster, Chicago writer and editor Bridget Gamble, chose Dean Young’s “Commencement” to celebrate.

 

Unlike Bridget, I am not a lover of graduation speeches, having sat through more than my fair share of follow-your-dreams and follow-this-bit-of-whimsical-advice exhortations.

 

But I do share her heartbreak for the millions of graduates denied ceremonies this year. Thanks, Bridget, for a timely reminder.

 

[NOTE:  If you enjoy Bridget’s writing as much as I do, you can subscribe to her weekly newsletter whelmed at www.bridgetgamble.com.]

 

And now to the podium, Ms. Gamble  . . .

 

*

 

 

Commencement

by Dean Young

 

I love you for shattering.

Someone has to. Just as someone

has to announce inadvertently

the end of grief or spring’s

splurge even as the bureaucracy’s

spittoon overflows. Someone has to come out

the other end of the labyrinth

saying, What’s the big deal?

Someone has to spend all day staring

at the data from outer space

or separating the receipts

or changing sheets in sour room after room.

I like it when the end of the toilet paper

is folded into a point.

I like napkins folded into swans

because I like wiping my mouth on swans.

Matriculates, come back from the dance floor

to sip at the lacrimal glands of chaos,

a god could be forgiven

for eating you, you’ve been such angels

just not very good ones.

You’ve put your tongue

into the peanut canister

of your best friend’s girlfriend’s mom.

You’ve taken a brown bag lunch

on which was writ another’s name.

All night it snows a blue snow

like the crystallized confessions

you’ve wrung from phantoms

even though it is you wearing the filched necklace,

your rages splitting the concrete like dandelions.

All that destruction from a ball of fluff!

There’s nothing left but hope.

 

 

I’ve been thinking about all the graduation ceremonies that won’t be happening this spring, and all the speeches that will never be. I may be in the minority, but I really love commencement speeches. I get goose bumps just reading them online. When my poetry professor in college, Danny Khalastchi, read this Dean Young poem to my class at the end of the spring semester during my junior year, it felt just as special to me as an actual commencement address. The opening line doesn’t seem to belong in a poem; it’s too risky, too cliché. But Dean gets away with it when he makes you laugh with lines about toilet paper and peanut canisters and not very good angels. Then suddenly, that last line—another one that only Dean Young can make feel fresh—knocks the wind out of you completely, just like you’d hope a commencement speech would.

 

Because I live near DePaul’s campus, I thought that was a good home for this poem. On a socially distant walk with my friend Casey, one of my best friends from college, we passed a stoplight that has an “I Closed Wolski’s” sticker on it. Wolski’s is a Milwaukee bar that we fell in love with (and managed to close once or twice) as college kids. So Dean’s poem belonged there, I knew. My wish is that someone experiencing grief in this pandemic—about a canceled graduation, or about anything—stumbles on it when they’re waiting for the walk signal, and feels some hope. Someone has to, right?

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