Memories are meant to be 
glared at. Like this exercise 
class—is it Stretch & Flex or 
Bend & Mend? Or is concrete 
the flavor of the sky? It’s 

so crunchy, like eggshells in 
cumulus meringue. Not doom’s 
heliotrope but kudzu 
crams its way through every spare 
thought with tendrils. Lavender 

sprigs surface in sea green tide. 
Heart shaped imaginations 
in the imaginer’s field 
pose as leaves, fresh from the dread 
of Joe’s Garage. Borage blooms, 

blue and purple, descend as if 
stars from sky. Watermelons, 
pre-Easter gray, wait graveside 
for paint, to be made festive. 
“Imaginary songs sound 

best,” Joe says, “from the heart of 
a Fender Stratocaster.” 
Willow branches bend as if 
the tree listens and weeps 
green along the kudzu sea. 

* Title is from the poem “Never Seek to Tell Thy Love” by John Ashbery in his collection A Wave (Penguin, 1985).

Poet’s Commentary

This poem began with a mondegreen, compliments of an e-mail from Los Angeles Magazine, and got deeper and darker from there. “Heliotrope” led to The Fickle Finger of Fate award from the 1960s television show Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (“doom’s heliotrope”). This morphed into Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (the heart as something lovely, dark and deep, like Frost’s woods) and T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (Eliot’s “To say: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead’” transposed into “leaves,” as in leaving the tomb “fresh from the dread”) and tumbled from there into the Ann Ronnell song, “Willow Weep for Me.”

Frank Zappa stopped in to interrupt, his song “Watermelon in Easter Hay” merging with the Robert Duncan poem “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” (both “the imagination of the imaginer” in Zappa’s lyrics and the “made place” of Duncan’s poem constructed consciously or subconsciously to various degrees but manufactured and periodically remodeled nonetheless). If you know the song’s introduction, the last two stanzas make more sense. The poem itself is a statement of transience and transition. An extension on my yearly fixation on the Saturday before Easter? I tend to telescope references into too compact a space for their or my own good. It’s almost like the warning line, “Some assembly required.” Please be patient.

Jonathan Yungkans

is a Los Angeles-based writer and photographer with an MFA from California State University, Long Beach. His work has appeared in San Pedro Poetry Review, Synkroniciti, West Texas Literary Review, Gleam: Journal of the Cadralor, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and other publications. His second poetry chapbook, Beneath a Glazed Shimmer, won the 2019 Clockwise Chapbook Prize and was published in February 2021 by Tebor Bach.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ It Belongs to Each of Us Like a Blanket by Jonathan Yungkans, Winner of “The Question of Questions” Ekphrastic Writing Challenge (Issue 15, September 2022)

⚡ Le Grand Matin by Jonathan Yungkans, a Finalist in MacQ’s Triple-Q Writing Challenge (Issue 11, January 2022)

⚡ La Porte by Yungkans in MacQ’s special Christmas Eve issue (10X, December 2021)

⚡ Two Duplex Poems, plus author’s notes on the poems and on the form, by Yungkans in Issue 10 of MacQ (October 2021)

⚡ Lawful and Proper, poem in Rise Up Review (Fall 2020)

⚡ Cadralor in the Key of F-Sharp as It Cuts into My Spine, in the inaugural issue of Gleam (Fall 2020)

⚡ I’d Love to Cook Like Hannibal Lecter [video], read by the poet at an event sponsored by Moon Tide Press (10 October 2019) celebrating the anthology Dark Ink: A Poetry Anthology Inspired by Horror

⚡ Saving the Patient, poem in The Voices Project (18 January 2018)