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[adorable]

Essay On The Personal
by Stephen Dunn

Because finally the personal
is all that matters,
we spend years describing stones,
chairs, abandoned farmhouses—
until we're ready. Always
it's a matter of precision,
what it feels like
to kiss someone or to walk
out the door. How good it was
to practice on stones
which were things we could love
without weeping over. How good
someone else abandoned the farmhouse,
bankrupt and desperate.
Now we can bring a fine edge
to our parents. We can hold hurt
up to the sun for examination.
But just when we think we have it,
the personal goes the way of
belief. What seemed so deep
begins to seem naive, something
that could be trusted
because we hadn't read Plato
or held two contradictory ideas
or women in the same day.
Love, then, becomes an old movie.
Loss seems so common
it belongs to the air,
to breath itself, anyone's.
We're left with style, a particular
way of standing and saying,
the idiosyncratic look
at the frown which means nothing
until we say it does. Years later,
long after we believed it peculiar
to ourselves, we return to love.
We return to everything
strange, inchoate, like living
with someone, like living alone,
settling for the partial, the almost
satisfactory sense of it.


Named
by Stephen Dunn

He'd spent his life trying to control the names
people gave him;
oh the unfair and the accurate equally hurt.

Just recently he'd been a son-of-a-bitch
and sweetheart in the same day,
and once again knew what antonyms

love and control are, and how comforting
it must be to have a business card -
Manager, Specialist - and believe what it says.

Who, in fact, didn't want his most useful name
to enter with him,
when he entered a room, who didn't want to be

that kind of lie? A man who was a sweetheart
and a son-of-a-bitch
was also more or less every name

he'd ever been called, and when you die, he thought,
that's when it happens,
you're collected forever into a few small words.

But never to have been outrageous or exquisite,
no grand mistake
so utterly yours it causes whispers

in the peripheries of your presence - that was
his fear.
"Reckless"; he wouldn't object to such a name

if it came from the right voice with the right
amount of reverence.
Someone nearby, of course, certain to add "fool."