Sweetness by Stephen Dunn
I haven’t cried in a while. And when I do, and it’s over a poem, I feel the infinite beauty of the world for a moment, and I wonder what I did to deserve all this.
Sweetness
Stephen DunnJust when it has seemed I couldn’t bear
one more friend
waking with a tumor, one more maniacwith a perfect reason, often a sweetness
has come
and changed nothing in the worldexcept the way I stumbled through it,
for a while lost
in the ignorance of lovingsomeone 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 lowand guttural, he repeated what he needed
to repeat, and I repeated
the one or two words we have for such griefuntil we were speaking only in tones.
Often a sweetness comes
as if on loan, stays just long enoughto make sense of what it means to be alive,
then returns to its dark
source. As for me, I don’t carewhere it’s been, or what bitter road
it’s traveled
to come so far, to taste so good.