DUNN, Stephen

Happiness

A state you must dare not enter

with hopes of staying,

quicksand in the marshes, and all

the roads leading to a castle

that doesn't exist.

But there it is, as promised,

with its perfect bridge above

the crocodiles,

and its doors forever open.

Beautiful Women

More things come to them,

and they have more to hide.

All around them: mirror, eyes.

In any case

they are different from other women

and like great athletes have trouble

making friends, and trusting a world

quick to praise.

I admit without shame

I’m talking about superficial beauty,

the beauty unmistakable

to the honest eye, which causes

some of us to pivot and to dream,

to tremble before we dial.

Intelligence warmed by generosity

is inner beauty, and what’s worse

some physically beautiful woman have it,

and we have to be strapped and handcuffed

to the mast, or be ruined.

But I don’t want to talk of inner beauty,

it’s the correct way to talk

and I’d feel too good

about myself, like a parishioner.

Now, in fact,

I feel like I’m talking

to a strange beautiful woman at a bar, I’m

animated, I’m wearing that little fixed

smile, I might say anything at all.

Still, it’s better to treat a beautiful woman

as if she were normal, one of many.

She’ll be impressed that you’re unimpressed,

might start to lean your way.

This is especially true if she has aged

into beauty, for she will have learned

the sweet gestures one learns

in a lifetime of seeking love.

Lucky is the lover of such a woman

and lucky the woman herself.

Beautiful woman who’ve been beautiful girls

are often in some tower of themselves

waiting for us to make the long climb.

But let us have sympathy for the loneliness

of beautiful women.

Let us have no contempt for their

immense privilege, or for the fact

that they never can be wholly ours.

It is not astonishing

when the scared little girl in all of them

says here I am, or when they weep.

But we are always astonished by what

beautiful women do.

“Boxers punch harder when women are around,”

Kenneth Patchen said. Think what happens

when beautiful women are around.

We do not question

that a thousand ships were launched.

In the eye of the beholder? A platitude.

A beautiful woman enters a room,

and everyone beholds. Geography changes.

We watch her everywhere she goes.

The Vanishings

One day it will vanish,

how you felt when you were overwhelmed

by her, soaping each other in the shower,

or when you heard the news

of his death, there in the T-Bone diner

on Queens Boulevard amid the shouts

of short-order cooks, Armenian, oblivious.

One day one thing and then a dear other

will blur and though they won’t be lost

they won’t mean as much,

that motorcycle ride on the dirt road

to the deserted beach near Cadiz,

the Guardia mistaking you for a drug-runner,

his machine gun in your belly—

already history now, merely your history,

which means everything to you.

You strain to bring back

your mother’s face and full body

before her illness, the arc and tenor

of family dinners, the mysteries

of radio, and Charlie Collins,

eight years old, inviting you

to his house to see the largest turd

that had ever come from him, unflushed.

One day there’ll be almost nothing

except what you’ve written down,

then only what you’ve written down well,

then little of that.

The march on Washington in ’68

where you hoped to change the world

and meet beautiful, sensitive women

is choreography now, cops on horses,

everyone backing off, stepping forward.

The exam you stole and put back unseen

has become one of your stories,

overtold, tainted with charm.

All of it, anyway, will go the way of icebergs

come summer, the small chunks floating

in the Adriatic until they’re only water,

pure, and someone taking sad pride

that he can swim in it, numbly.

For you, though, loss, almost painless,

that Senior Prom at the Latin Quarter—

Count Basie and Sarah Vaughan, and you

just interested in your date’s cleavage

and staying out all night at Jones Beach,

the small dune fires fueled by driftwood.

You can’t remember a riff or a song,

and your date’s a woman now, married,

has had sex as you have

some few thousand times, good sex

and forgettable sex, even boring sex,

oh you never could have imagined

back then with the waves crashing

what the body could erase.

It’s vanishing as you speak, the soul-grit,

the story-fodder,

everything you retrieve is your past,

everything you let go

goes to memory’s out-box, open on all sides,

in cahoots with thin air.

The jobs you didn’t get vanish like scabs.

Her good-bye, causing the phone to slip

from your hand, doesn’t hurt anymore,

too much doesn’t hurt anymore,

not even that hint of your father, ghost-thumping

on your roof in Spain, hurts anymore.

You understand and therefore hate

because you hate the passivity of understanding

that your worst rage and finest

private gesture will flatten and collapse

into history, become invisible

like defeats inside houses. Then something happens

(it is happening) which won’t vanish fast enough,

your voice fails, chokes to silence;

hurt (how could you have forgotten?) hurts.

Every other truth in the world, out of respect,

slides over, makes room for its superior.