Dean Young died today. I watch an interview in which he calls himself a fossil. I watch an interview in which he says we are failing and difficult like a windstorm. I watch an interview in which he says all his poems are lists. On the news crawl: an article about a group of LARPers in Poland who pretend to dress like Americans on the 4th of July. American flag tee-shirts and camouflage and Kentucky Fried Chicken. A fat cop eating a donut. A girl with a fluorescent fanny pack. “LARP 4th of July is a drama about the wasted American dream,” the LARP group says on their Facebook page. And Dean Young is dead. And everyone else is posting poems about the end of summer. About August. In this poem, a poet says he cannot recognize his hands. In this poem, a poet says blossom a lot. Blossom after blossom after blossom. In this poem, Dean Young says we are full of holes. In another poem, Dean Young and Tony Hoagland talk about birds. About Dean Young’s heart surgery. How the new heart learning to beat inside him was like poetry. And it makes me sad. Because I know the two of them had stopped talking. And the last time I saw Hoagland was in a magazine. He looked like a very beautiful skeleton. No one seemed to care. And then he died. And now Dean Young is dead. But I’d like to believe, somewhere, that the two of them are falling in love again. Like how the two of them made me fall in love with poetry when I found their books in a Borders which is now a year-long Christmas supply store. Which seems very American doesn’t it? A bunch of ornaments and tinsel above an unwashed linoleum floor. A row of motion-detecting Santa robots jerking into motion every time someone passes them. Clicking and clacking. Like the sound of two skeletons dancing.