Showing posts with label reserved. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reserved. Show all posts

1/29/19

AT HIS HOUSE - Stephen Dunn

In my friend's face it's not easy to separate
what's serenity, what's despair.
What the mouth suggests the eyes correct,

and what looks like acceptance
is a kind of détente, the world allowed
to encroach only so far.

At his house, we put aside
the large questions: Is there? And if so?
replace them with simple chores.

We bring vegetables in from the garden.
We shuck corn. Is it possible
to be a good citizen without saying a word?

Both his wives thought not, wanted love
to have a language he never learned.
He'd make wine for them from dandelions.

Sundays he'd serve them breakfast in bed.
In his toolbox he was sure he had a tool
for whatever needed to be fixed.

The deed reveals the man, he says.
I don't tell him that it's behind deeds
he and I often hide.

I've got a face for noon, a face for dusk,
a fact he lets slide. Both of us think friendship
is about what needn't be said. 

It seems we're a couple of halves, men
almost here, hardly there. At his house less
feels good. I always come back for more.

12/11/15

Lamium - Louise Glück

This is how you live when you have a cold heart.
As I do: in shadows, trailing over cool rock,
under the great maple trees.

The sun hardly touches me.
Sometimes I see it in early spring, rising very far away.
Then leaves grow over it, completely hiding it. I feel it
glinting through the leaves, erratic,
like someone hitting the side of a glass with a metal spoon.

Living things don't all require
light in the same degree. Some of us
make our own light: a silver leaf
like a path no one can use, a shallow
lake of silver in the darkness under the great maples.

But you know this already.
You and the others who think
you live for truth and, by extension, love
all that is cold.