Stephen Dunn

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.

for Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Kurt Brown 1. RETREAT The sailor dreamt of loss, but it was I who dreamt the sailor. I was landlocked, sea-poor. The sailor dreamt of a woman who stared at the sea, then tired of it, advertised her freedom. She said to her friend: I want all the fire one can have without being consumed by it. Clearly, I dreamt the woman too. I was surrounded by mountains suddenly green after a long winter, a chosen uprootedness, soul shake-up, every day a lesson about the vastness between ecstasy and repose. I drank coffee called Black Forest at the local cafe. I took long walks and tried to love the earth and hate its desecrations. All the Golden Retrievers wore red bandannas on those muttless streets. All the birches, I think, were aspens. I do not often remember my dreams, or dream of dreamers in them. To be without some of the things you want, a wise man said, is an indispensable part of happiness. 2. MOUNTAIN, SKY I’ve been paying attention to the sky again. I’ve seen a ravine up there, and a narrow, black gorge. Not to worry, I tell myself, about tricks the mind plays, as long as you know they’re tricks. If the rich are casually cruel perhaps it’s because they can stare at the sky and never see an indictment in the shape of clouds. The frown, for example, in a thunderhead. The fist. That big mountain I’ve been looking at— I love how it borrows purple from the filtered light, sometimes red. Like any of us it’s all of its appearances. It’s good that the rich have to die, a peasant saying goes, otherwise they’d live forever. Here in this rented house, high up, I understand. I’m one of the rich for a while. The earth feels mine and the air I breathe is rarefied, if thin. Dusk now is making its last claim. I love the confluence of dark mountain, dark sky. Soon I won’t know the beginning from the end. 3. HIM Those empty celebrations of the half-believer along for the ride. Those secret words repeated in mirrors— someone’s personal fog. A man’s heart ransomed for comfort or a few extra bucks, his soul in rags. I have been him and him and him. Was it nobility or senility when my old grandmother tried to drown artificial flowers in the bathtub? Can only saints carry the load without talking about the burden? I want to lean into life, catch the faintest perfume. In every boy child an old man is dying. By middle age he begins to stink, complain. I want to have gifts for him when we finally meet. I want him to go out like an ancient Egyptian, surrounded by what is his, desiring nothing. 4. DELINEATION AT DUSK A lost hour, and that animal lassitude after a vanished afternoon. Outside: joggers, cyclists. Motion, the great purifier, is theirs. If this were Europe someone in a tower might be ringing a bell. People hearing it would know similar truths, might even know exactly who they are. It’s getting near drinking time. It’s getting near getting near; a person alone conjures rules or can liquefy, fall apart. That woman with the bouffant— chewing gum, waiting for the bus— someone thinks she’s beautiful. It’s beautiful someone does. The sky’s murmuring, the storm that calls you up, makes promises, never comes. Somewhere else, no doubt, a happy man slicing a tomato, a woman with a measuring cup. Somewhere else: the foreclosure of a feeling or a promise, followed by silence or shouts. Here, the slow dance of contingency, an afternoon connected to an evening by a slender wish. Sometimes absence makes the heart grow sluggish and desire only one person, or one thing. I am closing the curtains. I am helping the night. 5. SOLITUDE A few days ago I stopped looking at the photographs clustered on the wall, nudes, which had become dull to me, like a tourist’s collection of smooth rocks. I turned away from the view and conjured a plague of starlings. Oh how they darkened the landscape. Surely such beauty had been waiting for its elegy. I felt like crushing a rhododendron. Now and again I feel the astonishment of being alive like this, in this body, the ventricles and the small bones in the hand, the intricacies of digestion .... When the radio said parents in California gave birth to another child so that their older child might have a bone-marrow transplant and live, I found myself weeping for such complicated beauty. How wonderful the radio and its distant, human voices. The rain now is quite without consequence coming down. I suppose I’ve come to the limits of my paltry resources, this hankering for people and for massive disturbance, then high pressure, the sequence that’s been promised for days. I will long to be alone when my friends arrive. 6. THE BODY WIDENS The body widens, and people are welcomed into it, many at a time. This must be what happens when we learn to be generous when we’re not in love, or otherwise charmed. I’ve been examining yesterday’s ashes. I’ve visited my own candleless altar. Little by little, the old selfish parts of me are loosening. I have a plan for becoming lean: to use all my fat in service of expansion. Have women always known this? Loveliness and fear when they open and let in and give away? The mountains here pierce the sky, and the sky, bountiful, closes in around them. 7. A NEW MOUTH Give me a new mouth; I want to talk. I’ve been watching the spider mend its web. I think I’ve learned something about architecture from a swallow. Excuse me while I separate the nettles from the flowers, while I put my nose to the black moist smell of earth and come up smiling. Somewhere in the world is the secret name for God, many-lettered, unpronounceable. There’s a speakable grace in the fields and even in the cities. The grapes ripen, someone refuses to become a machine. And yet I want to talk about the worn-out husks of men and women returning from the factories, the venereal streets, the bruise history passes down to its forlorn children. I need a new mouth to acknowledge that piety will keep us small, imprisoned, that it’s all right to be ridiculous and sway first to the left, then to the right, in order to find our balance. I’ve been watching an evening star quiver. I’ve been trying to identify the word before its utterance. Give me a new mouth and I’ll be a guardian against forgetfulness. I’ve noticed the wind doesn’t discriminate between sycamore and cypress. I want to find the cool, precise language for how passion gives rise to passion. 8. STRANGER The wind gone. I can hear my breathing. I can hear the lateness of the hour by what isn’t moving. Woodrun Slope. Snowmass Village. These are winter names, and it’s summer. The water from the mountains rushes down man-made gullies. Serious phantoms with their black tears are out tonight. I’m close—my other delusion goes— to the heart of things. A young man with a young man’s itch would rise and go out prowling. Tomorrow I’ll choose a mountain that’s a hill, take the slowest horse at the Lazy-7, slow and old, sure to know its trail. I knew a man who said he could dominate solitude. In other ways, too, he was a fool. Once I wanted to be one of those fabulous strangers who appear and disappear. Now I arrive only by invitation, stay long enough to earn my fare. Outside my window, clouds from the west erasing the stars. A coyote howling its singular news. At whatever pace, isn’t there an imperative to live? Before a person dies he should experience the double fire, of what he wants and shouldn’t have.

Finally, I gave up on obeisance, and refused to welcome either retribution or the tease of sunny days. As for the can’t-be- seen, the sum-of-all-details, the One—oh, when it came to salvation I was only sure I needed to be spared someone else’s version of it. The small prayers I devised had in them the hard sounds of split and frost . I wanted them to speak as if it made sense to speak to what isn’t there in the beaconless dark. I wanted them to startle by how little they asked.

Anyone who begins a sentence with, “In all honesty ... ” is about to tell a lie. Anyone who says, “This is how I feel” had better love form more than disclosure. Same for anyone who thinks he thinks well because he had a thought. If  you say, “You’re ugly” to an ugly person — no credit for honesty, which must always be a discovery, an act that qualifies as an achievement. If  you persist you’re just a cruel bastard, a pig without a mirror, somebody who hasn’t examined himself enough. A hesitation hints at an attempt to be honest, suggests a difficulty is present. A good sentence needs a clause or two, interruptions, set off  by commas, evidence of a slowing down, a rethinking. Before I asked my wife to marry me, I told her I’d never be fully honest. No one, she said, had ever said that to her. I was trying to be radically honest, I said, but in fact had another motive. A claim without a “but” in it is, at best, only half  true. In all honesty, I was asking in advance to be forgiven.

Diarrhea: what nobody likes, though a word the French love to pronounce. They surround it with lips and tongue; it pleases, like saying cellar door does. Once I gave a pair of tweezers to an au pair girl who couldn’t extract a splinter from her foot. It was a pleasure for both of us to see that little thing come out.

Because the ostracized experience the world in ways peculiar to themselves, often seeing it clearly yet with such anger and longing that they sometimes enlarge what they see, she at first saw Brigantine as a paradise for gulls. She must be a horseshoe crab washed ashore. How startling, though, no one knew about her past, the scandal with Percy, the tragic early deaths, yet sad that her Frankenstein had become just a name, like Dracula or Satan, something that stood for a kind of scariness, good for a laugh. She found herself welcome everywhere. People would tell her about Brigantine Castle, turned into a house of horror. They thought she'd be pleased that her monster roamed its dark corridors, making children scream. They lamented the day it was razed. Thus Mary Shelley found herself accepted by those who had no monster in them — the most frightening people alive, she thought. Didn't they know Frankenstein had abandoned his creation, set him loose without guidance or a name? Didn't they know what it feels like to be lost, freaky, forever seeking who you are? She was amazed now that people believed you could shop for everything you might need. She loved that in the dunes you could almost hide. At the computer store she asked an expert if there was such a thing as too much knowledge, or going too far? He directed her to a website where he thought the answers were. Yet Mary Shelley realized that the pain she felt all her life was gone. Could her children, dead so young, be alive somewhere, too? She couldn't know that only her famous mother had such a chance. She was almost ready to praise this awful world.

In love, his grammar grew rich with intensifiers, and adverbs fell madly from the sky like pheasants for the peasantry, and he, as sated as they were, lolled under shade trees until roused by moonlight and the beautiful fraternal twins and and but. Oh that was when he knew he couldn’t resist a conjunction of any kind. One said accumulate, the other was a doubter who loved the wind and the mind that cleans up after it. For love he wanted to break all the rules, light a candle behind a sentence named Sheila, always running on and wishing to be stopped by the hard button of a period. Sometimes, in desperation, he’d look toward a mannequin or a window dresser with a penchant for parsing. But mostly he wanted you, Sheila, and the adjectives that could precede and change you:bluesy,fly-by-night, queen of all that is and might be.

Rent a flatbed with a winch. With the right leverage anything can be hoisted, driven off. Or the man with a Bobcat comes in, then the hauler with his enormous truck. A leveler or a lawyer does the rest; experts always are willing to help. The structure was old, rotten in spots. Hadn't it already begun to implode? Believe you've just sped the process up. Photographs, toys, the things that break your heart—let's trust they would have been removed, perhaps are safe with the children who soon will have children of their own. It's over. It's time for loss to build its tower in the yard where you are merely a spectator now. Admit you'd like to find something discarded or damaged, even gone, and lift it back into the world.

Because with alarming accuracy she’d been identifying patterns I was unaware of—this tic, that tendency, like the way I’ve mastered the language of intimacy in order to conceal how I felt— I knew I was in danger of being terribly understood.

The housework, the factory work, the work that takes from the body and does not put back. The white-collar work and the dirt of its profits, the terrible politeness of the office worker, the work that robs the viscera to pay the cool surfaces of the brain. All the work that makes love difficult, brings on sleep, drops the body off at the liquor cabinet. All the work that reaches the intestines and sprawls. And the compulsive work after the work is done, those unfillable spaces of the Calvinist, or certain marriage beds.