Thursday, June 25, 2015

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.


"Sweetness" by Stephen Dunn from New and Selected Poems. © Norton, 1994.

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

It’s said they planted trees by graves
to soak up spirits of the dead
through roots into the growing wood.
The favorite in the burial yards
I knew was common juniper.
One could do worse than pass into
such a species. I like to think
that when I’m gone the chemicals
and yes the spirit that was me
might be searched out by subtle roots
and raised with sap through capillaries
into an upright, fragrant trunk,
and aromatic twigs and bark,
through needles bright as hoarfrost to
the sunlight for a century
or more, in wood repelling rot
and standing tall with monuments
and statues there on the far hill,
erect as truth, a testimony,
in ground that’s dignified by loss,
around a melancholy tree
that’s pointing toward infinity.


"Living Tree" by Robert Morgan from Dark Energy. © Penguin, 2014.