STATE LINES

California Poetry

C. Dale Young says his poems in “The Halo” amount to a “quasi-autobiography about a man who has wings and wants desperately to simply be human.” The book meditates on faith, memory and love. Printed here is the title poem, in which Young’s dramatized self-portrait hovers between spirit and body. The young man has barely survived a car accident and wakes in a hospital with a brace screwed into his skull. In the sweaty fever dream of these poems, the brace becomes the man’s halo, and his body a symbol of transformation. Fans of W.H. Auden will hear an echo of “Musee des Beaux Arts” in the poem’s first few lines.

The Halo

In the paintings left to us by the Old Masters, the halo, a smallish cloud of light, clung to the head, carefully framed the faces of mere mortals made divine. Accident? My body launched by a car’s incalculable momentum? It ended up outside the car. I had no idea then what it was like to lose days, to wake and find everything had changed. Through glass, this body went through the glass window, the seatbelt snapping my neck. Not the hanged man, not a man made divine but more human. I remember those pins buried in my skull, the cold metal frame surrounding my head, metal reflecting a small fire, a glow. All was changed. In that bed, I was a locust. I was starving. And how could I not be? I,I ... I am still ravenous.

C. Dale Young is the author of four collections of poetry and a forthcoming short story collection. He practices medicine and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. He lives in San Francisco. “The Halo” was published in “The Halo” (2016). It appears with the permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved.

David Roderick is the co-founder of Left Margin LIT: A Home for the Literary Arts, in Berkeley. He is author of “Blue Colonial” and “The Americans.”