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After Making Love


No one should ask the other,
"What were you thinking?"

No one, that is,
who doesn't want to hear about the past

and its inhabitants,
or the strange loneliness of the present

filled, even as it may be, with pleasure
or those snapshots

of the future, different heads,
on different bodies.

Some people actually desire honesty.
They must never have broken

into their own solitary houses
after having misplaced the key,

never seen with an intruder's eyes
what is theirs.

EMPTINESS

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I’ve heard yogis talk of a divine
emptiness,
the body free of its base desires,

some coiled and luminous god
in all of us
waiting to be discovered…

and always I’ve pivoted,

followed Blake’s road of excess
to the same source
and know how it feels to achieve

nothing, the nothing that exists
after accomplishment.
And I’ve known the emptiness

of nothing to say, no reason to move,
those mornings I’ve built
a little cocoon with the bedcovers

and lived in it, almost happily,
because what fools
the body more than warmth?

And more than once

I’ve shared an emptiness with someone
and learned
how generous I could be – here,

take this, take this…

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SweetNESS

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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.

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The Sacred

​

After the teacher asked if anyone had
a sacred place
and the students fidgeted and shrank

in their chairs, the most serious of them all
said it was his car,
being in it alone, his tape deck playing

things he’d chosen, and others knew the truth
had been spoken
and began speaking about their rooms,

their hiding places, but the car kept coming up,
the car in motion,
music filling it, and sometimes one other person

who understood the bright altar of the dashboard
and how far away
a car could take him from the need

to speak, or to answer, the key
in having a key
and putting it in, and going.

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Each From Different HeigHT

​

That time I thought I was in love
and calmly said so
was not much different from the time
I was truly in love
and slept poorly and spoke out loud
to the wall
and discovered the hidden genius
of my hands
And the times I felt less in love,
less than someone,
were, to be honest, not so different
either.
Each was ridiculous in its own way
and each was tender, yes,
sometimes even the false is tender.
I am astonished
by the various kisses we're capable of.
Each from different heights
diminished, which is simply the law.
And the big bruise
from the long fall looked perfectly white
in a few years.
That astounded me most of all.

​

​

some things i wanted to say to yoU

​

if the horse that you ride

is blind it’s good

that it also be slow,

and please stroke it

a hundred more times than you would

the powerful dazzling one.

to be generous is one thing,

but there’s a clerk in some of us,

quick to say yes.

worry about the command

in the suggestion.

worry about smiles, and those men

whose business is business.

there are joys and enigmas

of an evening alone

to appreciate.

there are always the simple events

of your life

that you might try to convert

into legend.

did you know

a good dog in your house

can make you more thoughtful,

even more moral?

and sex without conversation,

sex that’s erotic or sleepy…

oh don’t let anybody tell you

there’s a wrong way to have it.

tell your lovers the world

robs us in so many ways

that a caress is your way

of taking something back.

tell the dogs and the horses

you love them more than cars.

speak to everything

would be my advice.

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October 16, 2016

STEPHEN DUNN

             (b.1939)

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