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Sweetness by Stephen Dunn

By T.

3 September 2005

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Sweetness
Stephen Dunn

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.

MARGINALIA

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.

ABOUT STEPHEN DUNN

Poet Stephen Dunn was born on June 24, 1939 in New York City. The first of his family to go to college, Dunn earned a BA from Hofstra University on a basketball scholarship and later worked in advertising. Dunn attended the New School and earned an MA in creative writing from Syracuse University, where he studied with Philip Booth, Donald Justice, and W.D. Snodgrass. Dunn was the author of numerous books of poetry, including Pagan Virtues (2019); Keeper of Limits (2015); Lines… (more)