Sweetness by 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

Nervous System // Michael Dickman

Make a list
of everything that’s
ever been

on fire –

Abandoned cars
Trees
The sea

Your mother burned down to the skeleton

so she could come back, born back from her bed, and walk around the
             house again, exhausted
             in slippers

What else?

Your brain
Your eyes
Your lungs

*

When you look down
inside yourself
what is there?

You are a walking bag of surgical instruments
shining from the inside out

and that’s just
today

Tomorrow it could be different

When I think of the childhood inside me I think of sunlight dying on
             a windowsill

The voices of my friends
in the sunlight

All of us running around
outside our
deaths

*

Someone is here
to see you
again

Someone has come a long way with their arms out in front of them
             like a child

walking down a hallway
at night

Make room for them –
they’re very tired

I wish I could look down past the burning chandelier inside me

where the language begins
to end
and

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