sweetness

SWEETNESS

Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear
one more friend
waking with a tumor, one more maniac

with a perfect reason, often a sweetness
has come
and changed nothing in the world

except the way I stumbled through it,
for a while lost
in the ignorance of loving

someone or something,
the world shrunk
to mouth-size,
hand-size,
and never seeming small.

I acknowledge there is no sweetness
that doesn’t leave a stain,
no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet ....

Tonight a friend called to say his lover
was killed in a car
he was driving. His voice was low

and guttural, he repeated what he needed
to repeat, and I repeated
the one or two words we have for such grief

until we were speaking only in tones.
Often a sweetness comes
as if on loan, stays just long enough

to make sense of what it means to be alive,
then returns to its dark
source. As for me, I don’t care

where it’s been,
or what bitter road
it’s traveled
to come so far, to taste so good.

Stephen Dunn

Stephen Dunn, “Sweetness” from New and Selected Poems 1974-1994. Copyright © 1989 by Stephen Dunn.
arthurwesleydow

whatever you can

WALKING THE MARSHLAND

It was no place for the faithless,
so I felt a little odd
walking the marshland with my daughters,


Canada geese all around and the blue
herons just standing there;
safe, and the abundance of swans.



The girls liked saying the words,
gosling,
egret, whooping crane, and they liked

when I agreed. The casinos were a few miles
to the east.
I liked saying craps and croupier


and sometimes I wanted to be lost
in those bright
windowless ruins. It was April,

the gnats and black flies
weren't out yet.
The mosquitoes hadn't risen

from their stagnant pools to trouble
paradise and to give us
the great right to complain.

I loved these girls. The world
beyond Brigantine
awaited their beauty and beauty

is what others want to own.
I'd keep that
to myself. The obvious




was so sufficient just then.
Sandpiper. Red-wing
Blackbird. "Yes," I said.

But already we were near the end.
Praise refuge,
I thought. Praise whatever you can.

Stephen Dunn

(reprinted from Between Angels, Poems by Stephen Dunn, by permission of the author and WW Norton & Company Inc. Copyright © 1989 Stephen Dunn.)

The Japanese regard the crane as a symbol of good fortune and longevity because of its fabled life span of a thousand years. It also represents fidelity, as Japanese cranes are known to mate for life.

sunday, actually

SIXTY

Because in my family
the heart goes first
and hardly anybody makes it
out of his fifties,
I think I'll stay up late with
a few bandits
of my choice and resist good advice.
I'll invent a secret scroll
lost by Egyptians
and reveal its contents:
the directions
to your house,
recipes for forgiveness.
History says my ventricles
are stone alleys,
my heart itself a city with a terrorist
holed up in the mayor's office.
I'm in the mood to punctuate

only with that maker of promises, the colon:
next, next, next, its says, God bless it.
As García Lorca may have written:
some people
forget to live as if a great arsenic lobster
could fall on their heads at any moment.
My sixtieth birthday is tomorrow.
Come, play poker with me,
I want to be taken to the cleaners.
I've had it with all stingy-hearted
sons of bitches.
A heart is to be spent.
As for me, I'll share
my mulcher with anyone
who needs to mulch.

It's time to give up
the search for the invisible.
On the best of days there's little more
than the faintest intimations.
The millennium,
my dear, is sure to disappoint us.
I think I'll keep on describing things
to ensure that they really happened.

Stephen Dunn