The Reverse Side by Stephen Dunn

The reverse side also has a reverse side.

—A Japanese Proverb

It’s why when we speak a truth
some of us instantly feel foolish
as if a deck inside us has been shuffled
and there it is—the opposite
of what we said.

And perhaps why as we fall in love
we’re already falling out of it.

It’s why the terrified and the simple
latch onto one story,
just one version of the great mystery.

Image & afterimage, oh even
the open-minded yearn for a fiction
to reign things in—
the snapshot, the lie of the frame.

How do we not go crazy,
we who have found ourselves compelled
to live with the circle, the ellipsis, the word
not yet written.

"Last year in a room where survivors
were gathered 
I watched one man's obstinate calm
when it was his turn to thank God,
how he kept what was his
his, the lovely discrepancy
between what the world expected
and what he gave.
or perhaps he was just shy, and I made him
into a man I needed just then. Either way,
I was happy
to witness and be part of something
that ever-so-little could rock the heart, 
tip it
toward fullness." 

#loveliness

Monogamy by Stephen Dunn (excerpt)

"After all, there's the suddenly desirable
mono in monogamy to celebrate,
the new freedom of wanting
only one person. Start again,
but admit you wouldn't advocate this
for anyone save yourself. Acknowledge
it's a state you've traveled far
to reach, motels and the overly careful
spelling of aliases behind you.
Acknowledge it takes long experience
in order to think of sameness
as an opportunity for imagination."

Beliefs by Stephen Dunn

I believed in nothing, so I thought
no system of smoke and desire
got in the way of what I saw.

There is another world
if only it could be seen,
slag heaps and golden valleys,
crime and celibacy-

visible companions-if say,
your politics could braid them,
and there were all the gods
in the darkness of our needs.

That was when I realized
that to believe in nothing
is a belief too, and not much fun
either, and acceptance

of the world as it is is as dumb
as standing still when floodwaters rise.
Fortunately in the midst of it all

you came along with your singular beauty,
the truth of things for a while
tactile and unequivocal.

But often when you left the room
a few questions replaced you.
When you returned, they remained.

Is it possible to be in love
and wise at the same time?

In love, I might be so intuitively right
I'd be banned from a republic.  In love
I might believe any foolish thing I felt.

Over time, questions formed curlicues
in your hair. They became part of what
I thought when I thought about you.

So good then, when you stayed in the room,
giving them flesh, making them real.

"....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."

Stephen Dunn
                                   

Pure Balance by Galway Kinnell

Wherever we are is unlikely.
Our few kisses-I don't know if
they're of goodbye or of
what-or if she knows either.

neither do I understand why it's
exhilarating-as well as the other things it is-
to know one doesn't have a future,
or how much longer one won't have one.

Future tramples all prediction.
Hope loses hope. Clarity
turns out to be
an invisible form of sadness.

We look for a bridge to cross
to the other shore where our other
could be looking for us
but all the river crossings

all the way to the sea
have been bombed. We look for a tree-
touch it-touch
right through it-sometimes nowhere

is there anything to hitch oneself to,
and we must make our way by pure balance.
This is so and can't be helped
without doing damage to oneself.

Antilamentation by Dorianne Laux

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook, not
the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication, not
the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punch line, the door or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don't regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the living room couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You've walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the window.
Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied of expectation.
Relax. Don't bother remembering any of it. Let's stop here,
under the lit sign on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.