Suicides
It's usually a flirtation with Plath or Sexton or Berryman, but of my many students who've
written about suicide, two have actually done it. After the second, years ago,
I decided never to try to improve such a poem. We discuss it privately. I say,
Don't do it. I say, Make an appointment with a counselor. Meanwhile, for myself,
I've thought: how sensible. When my body becomes someone else's chore, when the
mind fogs and the days lengthen and I'm unable to transform suffering into one
of the higher pleasures, I hope to have the courage. Isn't there a curious elegance
in how one moment passes into another? And won't it be easy to assume I'm dead
already? But say a wise nurse, sensing my mood, shows me the tattoo on her breast.
And a wise friend reminds me that the right solutin is rarely the only one. I can
imagine the lovely tactics of those who care. Rehearsals, postponements.
Funerals
No right way to feel. Pure grief perhaps if the death was sudden and your child's.
But if a parent is lying there and you're no longer a child, likely that sadness
is mixing with relief. Perhaps there's even a small corner of freedom, in which
you find yourself making plans. When my brother wept at grandmother's funeral,
I drifted back to when Anthony Salvo hit him with a rock. "I'll get you dickface,
I'll get you dickface," he kept repeating through his tears. Once I caught myself
thinking about baseball. Another time, as the coffin was lowered, I recalled that
a group of larks is called an exaltation. And who hasn't imagined his
own dark day, even his own eulogy, and what friend might deliver it, and the
exact quavering of his voice.
Anger
A good thing, the experts say, the getting it out. I know they're right. The few big
times I've exhibited it, I felt spent and righteously clean. A grudge is more
my style, weeks, months of resentment silently borne. At my worst, after quarrels,
I've kept it in and let it mix with any old bitterness it could find. When it finally
emerged—stunted, timed, cruelly calm—I was no one's decent man. But I'm
seldom at my worst and can only envy the brilliantly angry in books and in films.
I can't bear anyone routinely angry, anyone with a childhood untamed. In truth,
I prefer the manners of those who keep most things to themselves. We're unable
to entertain opposites when we're angry. We're so bloody dull. Everything I love
about the mind disappears. I choose my friends by the quality of their hesitations,
their ability to be ambivalent about the smallest things. Harm anyone I love,
though, and I'll seek you out and break you fucking in two. I'd at least want to.
I'd certainly understand anyone who would.
Generosity
Not to be confused with philanthropy, capitalism's managed leftovers. Or with
largesse, a little something off the top. Generosity is that palpable extra
that comes along with the gift, motiveless as a good wind. Best is the extra that
comes unencumbered: pure generosity of spirit, always replenishing itself. We
the less generous are quick to suspect it, remembering what we've given and why.
But those who have it irradiate the day. They redefine the meaning of wealth.
We fall in love with them, we try to shine that brightly, yet before long they've
mostly instructed us about what it is we want to keep. Blessed are the generous
who keep enough for themselves so we can live with them without guilt. Blessed, too,
are those who receive well, so the generous get their reward. A cold heart is
not generosity's natural enemy. Scarcity is, and its crucible as well. Blessed are
the poor who give to the poor. In our world of plenty when our daughter was three,
at first we laughed at her mistake: "Share, share, and like." Then we praised it.
Midnight
'Round midnight. At some midnight place. The preludes to sex or loneliness nearing
their end. Soon the actual, the or removed, the mix. Midnight was once,
for me, a kind of beginning. I burned its valuable oil. For years it retained
its old curfew time's dark appeal. Now I think of bars getting nasty and maudlin.
My friend the insomniac trying another position, still pressing. The Blue
Diamond diner near the college starting to hum. I'm probably asleep, part of me
waiting for that screech owl and its nightly screech. I've flossed and brushed,
I've taken some pills that keep me even in the race I'll lose. Those nuanced
silences, a house's late-night tics—I miss them. I miss the way I used to
visit myself. But midnight has always belonged to those of us who would not stop at it,
who thought, if we were thinking at all at that hour, something which could not
come at noon would certainly come. Certainly: I used to use that word
back then.
Noon
Lovers in hotel rooms having their sweet hour, and when they emerge the noon
sun a son-of-a-bitch, all scrutiny, no slack. Or we walk out of our businesses
into it and the schmooze of a lunch. Or, as I remember in Cottonwood, the whistle
blows. The grain elevator man and Merle from the hardware store lunch at home.
Or, in a more distant life, Frankie Mauro the halfback opens his brown bag and
says, "Goddammit, peanut butter and jelly again!" and when we wonder why he
hasn't asked his mother to make him something else, he says he makes it himself.
Noon is like that, the comedy of too much out front, the analysand thinking he's
telling the truth when he says what he feels, Frankie Mauro missing—in
front of all of us—his own joke. It's gossip's hour, a bad time for tears.
It's already too late for the elusive theorem to be solved. In lousy jobs, it's
toward what the morning leans. It's around the time the nightwatchman taps the other side
of his bed, and no one's there. And the profligate, too, are just waking then,
scented with the night, seeming lucky to all of us who don't know them well.
(c) 1998 by Stephen Dunn. All rights reserved.
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