Buy
Different Hours
at Amazon.com
|
|
Flaws
I had been worrying once again
about sad lives
and almost perfect art, Van Gogh,
Kafka, so when that voice on the radio
sang about drinking
a toast to those who most survive
the lives they've led, I drank that toast
in the prayerless
sanctum of my room, I said it
out loud in a hush. Then I thought
of Dr. Williams
who toward the end apologized
to his wife for doing everything
he had loved to do.
He was speaking of course to death,
not to her, though death instructed him
how valuable she was.
I thought of a lamp the neighbor's child
had broken, then pieced back together
with wires and glue.
And my friend, the good husband,
kissing the scars his wife brought home
after the mastectomy.
I drank that toast again, though silently.
The radio was playing something old
and bad
I once thought was good.
Flaws. Suddenly the act of trying
to say how it feels
to live a life, to say it flawlessly,
seemed more immense than ever. Then
I remembered
those Persian rug makers built them in,
the flaws, because only Allah was perfect.
What arrogance to think
that otherwise they wouldn't be there!
I allowed myself to wonder
about the ethics
of repair, but just for a while.
Sleep, too, was on my mind
and I knew
the difficulty that lay ahead:
how hard I'd try when I couldn't,
how it would come
if only I could find a way
to enter and drift without concern
for what it is.
Emptiness
I've heard yogis talk of a divine
emptiness,
the body free of its base desires,
some coiled and luminous god
in all of us
waiting to be discovered . . .
and always I've pivoted,
followed Blake's road of excess
to the same source
and know how it feels to achieve
nothing, the nothing that exists
after accomplishment.
And I've known the emptiness
of nothing to say, no reason to move,
those mornings I've built
a little cocoon with the bedcovers
and lived in it, almost happily,
because what fools
the body more than warmth?
And more than once
I've shared an emptiness with someone
and learned
how generous I can behere,
take this, take this...
STEPHEN DUNN
won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for his book, Different Hours
(W. W. Norton, 2000). Among his awards are the Levinson Prize from Poetry
and fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.
He teaches at Richard Stockton College in New Jersey.
"Flaws" and "Emptiness" are taken from
(click title) BETWEEN ANGELS
(W.W. Norton, 1989)
ForPoetry |