HIS MUSIC - Stephen Dunn

It wasn’t that he liked being miserable.

He simply had grown used to wearing

a certain face, become comfortable

with his assortment of shrugs and sighs.

His friends said How are you?—

and prepared their sympathy cards.

Miserable was his style, his insurance

against life’s frightening, temporary joys.

And when the truly awful happened,

some rejection or loss,

how ready he was for its aftermath,

how appropriate his posture, his words.

Yet when she said she loved him

something silently wild and molecular

began its revolution; he would’ve smiled

if the news from the distant provinces

of his body had reached him in time.

He frowned. And did not allow the short sigh

which would have meant pleasure

but now, alone, was just old breath

escaping, the long ahhhh, that music

which soothed him, and was his song.

The Poet With His Face in His Hands - Mary Oliver

You want to cry aloud for your

mistakes. But to tell the truth the world

doesn’t need any more of that sound.

So if you’re going to do it and can’t

stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can’t

hold it in, at least go by yourself across

the forty fields and the forty dark inclines

of rocks and water to the place where

the falls are flinging out their white sheets

like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that

jubilation and water-fun and you can

stand there, under it, and roar all you

want and nothing will be disturbed; you can

drip with despair all afternoon and still,

on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched

by the passing foil of the water, the thrush,

puffing out its spotted breast, will sing

of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.