Stephen Dunn

And So

And so you call your best friend
who's away, just to hear his voice,
but forget his recording concludes
with "Have a nice day."

"Thank you, but I have other plans,"
you're always tempted to respond,
as an old lady once did, the clerk
in the liquor store unable to laugh.

Always tempted, what a sad
combination of words. And so
you take a walk into the neighborhood,
where the rhododendrons are out
and also some yellowy things

and the lilacs remind you of a song
by Nina Simone. "Where's my love?"
is its refrain. Up near Gravel Hill
two fidgety deer cross the road,
white tails, exactly where

the week before a red fox
made a more confident dash.
Now and then the world rewards,
and so you make your way back

past the careful lawns, the drowsy backyards,
knowing the soul on its own
is helpless, asleep in the hollows
of its rigging, waiting to be stirred.

Aren't They Beautiful?

Aren't they beautiful,
she said, with an edge,
because I hadn't commented
on these slender,
some would say splendid
purple things
we'd come upon. The foxglove,
she repeated, aren't they beautiful?

Foxglove, what a nice name,
I thought, I liked that name,
and told her so, but I was thinking
of conversation, the way beautiful
often puts an end to it.
And remembered as a child
those long drives in the country--
Look! a clearing. Look!
a swatch of wildflowers.

All the tedium of ahs and yeses,
all that piety before the perfect.

Beauty, for her, was a beginning,
an honest way in. I knew that,
yet still I wanted to say, Give me
what a troubled soul might see,
give me that kind of beautiful,
but heard the sanctimony in it,

told the truth instead, the truth
that also digs one's grave,
becomes its own epitaph.
Until you asked, I said,
I saw nothing, almost nothing.

Deprivation is the mother of beauty,
a wittier man might have declared,
pointing theatrically
to all this blinding abundance.
Or simply admitted he was a prisoner
of his prejudices, helplessly himself.

The foxglove were looking smug,
uncontestable. And there I was,
impatient, angling for an argument.
We were standing directly in front
of those tall, pendulous eye-catchers.
What do you see now? she asked,
you're staring right at them.

The lies of daylight, the failures of language,
God the vicious, hiding behind another veil.

Diogenes and the Honest Woman

After the few honest men he'd found
bored him into stupor,
and it became clear more disappointment
lay ahead, Diogenes darkened his lantern,
gave it all up. Honesty, he'd learned,

was what men confused with how they felt,
with whatever entered their minds.
No authoritative wonderment in their voices,
none of those hesitations that signal
a healthy collision of ideas.

He'd try to stay on the sidelines now,
perhaps uncloak a self-deception,
tweak a lie. But he wouldn't give up
sleeping in that cold tub of his. No,
still no amenities for him, nothing to blur

the hard facts, the way a woman might,
the way pleasure does. Even in retirement
he made sure he needed nothing, austerity
his dubious ism against the false.
Everyone but himself he found wanting.

Until she appeared, no one dared say
a man who carried a lantern around
in daylight was pretentious. No one
said publicly a wiser man would know
it's in the dark that truth is most told.

Word filtered to Diogenes of this woman,
quiet for years, who'd begun speaking
such things, and of the many who listened.
They said she could foretell the future.
But foretelling was the art of being exact

about what's right in front of us, she insisted.
Diogenes walked barefoot over cobblestones
to get to her house. Bring oranges, he was told,
a choice of plums. She liked fleshy things,
especially from the stoical.

"I've always admired your brilliance,"
she said to him. On the wall behind her chair,
in big letters: He who is fated to hang
is merely assured he won't drown--as if she knew
Diogenes would love its severity, which he did.

Here was a woman, he worried, who understood
how to make gestures to her opponent.
Before he could speak, she touched his hand.
"Sometimes, you know, there's little difference
between a brutal and an honest man."

Diogenes didn't know, but was sure now
he shouldn't have come. "Am I right, sir,
in that search of yours, you deprived yourself
of food and water, that you felt so pure
and unburdened...." Diogenes cut her off;

certain things were not debatable.
It was clearer than ever to him that women
were unable to understand the higher pursuits.
"Did you shine the light right in their faces?
What, pray tell, sir, did you expect?"

---

Stephen Dunn is the author of fourteen collections of poetry, including the recent Everything Else in the World (Norton), which was awarded the Paterson Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement. His Different Hours won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize. A book of his essays and memoirs, Walking Light, is available from BOA. He divides his time between Frostburg, Maryland, and southern New Jersey, where he is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Richard Stockton College. photograph by Andrea Dunn contents | previous | next