COLLECTING FUTURE LIVES - Stephen Dunn

Now that everybody was dead

only he and his brother knew

the blood secrets, the unequal

history each nervous system

keeps and rehearses

into a story, a life.

Over the years they’d agreed

to invent and remember

a long hum of good times,

love breaking through

during card games,

their father teaching them

to skip stones

under the Whitestone Bridge.

The smart liar in them

knew these stories

were for their children

who, that very moment

over dinner, were collecting

their future lives.

But sometimes

in their twice-a-year visits

late at night

when their wives had tired

of the old repetitions,

they’d bring up the silences

in the living room

after a voice had been raised,

father’s drinking, mother’s

long martyrdom before the gods

of propriety and common sense.

In their mannerisms

each could see the same ghosts.

And if they allowed themselves

to keep talking,

if they’d had enough to drink,

love would be all

that mattered, the love

they were cheated of

and the love they got,

the parental love

that if remembered at all

had been given, they decided,

and therefore could be given again.

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.

Entry in an Unknown Hand - Franz Wright

And still nothing happens. I am not arrested.  

By some inexplicable oversight

nobody jeers when I walk down the street.

I have been allowed to go on living in this  

room. I am not asked to explain my presence  

anywhere.

What posthypnotic suggestions were made; and  

are any left unexecuted?

Why am I so distressed at the thought of taking  

certain jobs?

They are absolutely shameless at the bank—

You’d think my name meant nothing to them. Non-

chalantly they hand me the sum I’ve requested,

but I know them. It’s like this everywhere—

they think they are going to surprise me: I,  

who do nothing but wait.

Once I answered the phone, and the caller hung up—

very clever.

They think that they can scare me.  

I am always scared.

And how much courage it requires to get up in the  

morning and dress yourself. Nobody congratulates  

you!

At no point in the day may I fall to my knees and  

refuse to go on, it’s not done.

I go on

dodging cars that jump the curb to crush my hip,

accompanied by abrupt bursts of black-and-white

laughter and applause,

past a million unlighted windows, peered out at  

by the retired and their aged attack-dogs—

toward my place,

the one at the end of the counter,  

the scalpel on the napkin.