by Carl Dennis
Do much in their modest way to brighten
The shady side of the street while begonias
And daisies bask on the sunny.
At the graveside, the minister
Read of the sparrow whose fall is noted by heaven
And numbered in a portfolio that must have grown
At last too heavy to carry. It’s hard to blame
The scribe grown old in service for retiring
To a solitude beyond the world
And contenting himself with the few acres
That he can handle, window-box tending
Compared to his former cosmic husbandry.
How festive they look on this street, these crowds of colors
Dotted with white. No gray hope, no gray memory,
No dusky signs of lament that they’re growing old
Far from the open fields that mothered them
And the forest margins.
The Next Life
If a few more lives are allowed me,
I’d like to give at least one to moving you
From the category of girl whose company I enjoyed
More than the company of others in high school
To the category of heart’s companion.
Then I’ll be the first person you turn to
When a wave of gloom breaks over you
Like the one that proved too heavy for you to bear.
A gloom I have to suppose on my own
Since only the bare facts reached me, thirdhand,
From a classmate’s sister, and almost a year
After you took your life, and you just thirty,
Married, teaching in high school
Just as you’d planned on doing long before.
When I heard, I thought of the story
You wrote for the writing club about a fear
That comes from nowhere to grip the heroine
And then moves off, leaving her shaken. A theme
That seemed surprising for a cheerful girl like you,
So interested in your studies, so popular you could choose
Among those who wanted to be your friend
Just the loyal few you felt at home with.
With me at your side, I let myself imagine,
The dark wave won’t hold you under
Long enough to drown you. Holding you up
May take all my skill and stamina
But not more. And when you thank me,
I’ll feel I ought to be thanking you
For giving my life an ample purpose,
One I’ll point to with pride when anyone asks
What I’m doing to further life on the planet.
As for the life I’ve chosen this time around,
I wouldn’t want to suggest I regret it.
It’s just that it seems composed of many little purposes
Not easy to piece together to make a grand one.
Still, though a little lacking in unity and direction,
It’s probably one of the dozen or so available
To the boy you knew that should leave him feeling
Grateful for many privileges, whereas your life
Fell short of each of the many that you deserved.
In my rescue project, I help you to one of them.
And when you ask what life I imagine next,
And sketch for me a life much like the one
I’m living now, I say, “No doubt about it,
It’s down on my list somewhere, but first I’ll rest;
And then I want to live ours again.”
Our Death
From the point of view of the dead, it’s likely nothing,
As Epicurus argues, but from ours
It’s the point on the page where the hand
Writing our story stops moving, no matter
How far the story lies from completion,
And the blank pages ahead are torn away.
The point when friends stop phoning for our opinion
Or to tell us what they always intended to say
But couldn’t. And if we imagine a letter then
Placed in our hands, we have to imagine as well
No strength to unfold it, no light to read by
Or to pen an answer with if we had a pen.
Hard to believe the library board meets Tuesday
With us not there to ask why our clients
Still fail to read what we’ve recommended.
And to think the chairman who seemed to support us
Now recommends that the list we cherished
Be altered to fit the taste of the crowd.
And those still voting our way, listening in the evening
To the discs we left them, will be surprised
At the widening gap between our taste in music
And theirs. And then they’ll turn to sketching the plans
For enlarging the summer house we never approved of,
That kept them away from their friends too long.
From a Practical Reader
I’m willing to buy your book of poems
If you can promise that whenever you liken a day
To a coin that can’t be hoarded,
You spell out exactly what I should buy with it
In the few hours left me before the sun
Sinks behind the garage outside my window,
What items more valuable than those in the shops,
And mention where they’re available locally.
I’m a plain person, I admit, with little patience
For vague suggestions, so if you believe
Poems need to be vague to be suggestive,
I’d better save my money for something else
(Money I don’t have endless supplies of,
Not with my job as bookkeeper for a hospital),
A work of history, say, or biography
Or a book of encouragement from the self-help section.
I could use a poem showing that those who seem
To be having a better time at work than I do,
Or a better time at the beach or hiking a trail,
Have simply learned to do more with moods
No better than my good moods,
While making less of the lesser ones.
I won’t complain if your book has many poems
Praising the joys of giving so long as it has a few
On the joys of taking. How to choose friends,
For example, who won’t forget me after I’m gone,
Who’ll tell my story now and then to themselves
If not to others. Friends glad to remember,
Who believe their gladness would be complete
If I were sitting beside them sharing it.
As for friends I’ve lost, do you have some advice
For the times I’m asked to speak at a funeral
When my feelings, ardent before,
Suddenly seem too cool and measured?
Don’t tell me to level my words down
To the flats of fact in the name of integrity
When the task before me is rising to the occasion.
If my feelings can’t make the climb, inspire me
To send up some phrases that would be honest
If I were the person I’d like to be.
The Master of Metaphor
Even on days when his body seems too heavy
And broken to live with gracefully,
He tries not to think of it as a prison,
Not to consider himself a spirit
Who merely happens to be embodied.
Better for him, he believes, to begin with body,
Body enlivened, awakened, inspirited.
As for the earth, how can it be a prison
When he’s an earthling, his lungs having evolved
To thrive in an atmosphere richly imbued
With the exhalations of earthly plant life,
His legs evolved to carry him to a stand of pear trees,
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His arms and hands to reach up and pluck?
And when he wakes in the dark an hour past midnight
With his lungs aching, gasping for breath,
He doesn’t blame the weight of his body
Or the weight of the earthly atmosphere.
It’s simply the weight of the dark itself.
And when he’s tempted to call that dark a prison,
He reminds himself its walls and bars will dissolve
Like mist when dawn finally arrives,
Dear dawn striding across the hills to lift the stone
Night has rolled on his chest and let him rise.
A miracle, he believes he can say without hyperbole,
If the term can refer to familiar splendor,
Not only to what’s revealed to the faithful
Far less often than once a day.
Sensible Summers
It isn’t absurd to learn the names of the constellations
Visible on a summer night near Wellfleet
So long as you bear in mind they won’t learn yours
And you don’t presume that your extra learning
Will win the heart of the lovely Lucinda Miles.
Not absurd to mutter her name to yourself
While you paint the porch of your summer house
Pale blue, the color of the heron eggs
You and your brother found in the tall grass
Behind the boathouse when you were boys.
Blue over the hunter green that doubtless
Reminded the man you bought the house from,
Old Mr. Barrows, of an episode even more distant.
The wish to feel the house all yours,
To cast away the awnings and badminton net
That Mr. Barrows stored in the cellar, isn’t absurd
So long as you can imagine owners to come
Doing the same one day to your leavings,
Your private papers mattering less to them
Than Barrows’ log of the weather matters to you.
Nothing absurd about spending all afternoon
Replacing the punky sections of clapboard
If you don’t assume that your side will triumph
In the war with dry rot and damp rot in the years to come,
A war your neighbor appears to have given up.
Tomorrow you’ll help him wrestle his boat
Down to the dock for the opening of a season
Delayed two months by an illness that’s left him
Bent-backed and sallow. Even if he dies before dawn
He can’t be dismissed as absurd for dreaming all night
Of hoisting his sail if he’s done it before
In the actual world and never been disappointed.
It isn’t absurd to ask if the memory of his boat
Under sail in the harbor isn’t just as real
As a boat tacking into the breeze now blowing,
Assuming “real” means available and vivid.
And why not ask, as you sit on the porch
This very evening, how something as small
As the porch can be roomy enough
To contain the husks of all you have left or lost
And the seeds of all you’ll be given.
To hope for answers vivid and heartening
Isn’t absurd if you recognize their coming
May be delayed while answers far different
Crowd up the walk uninvited
To offer their unremarkable explanations.
Manifesto
Isn’t it time, words of the world, to unite?
Time to resolve not to work anymore for the bosses
Who look upon you as so many hands and feet,
Drudges and drones in a garment sweatshop
Turning out coats so rich, so elegant,
They make the ugliest customers appear respectable.
Come gather, words, under the beautiful flag
I’m standing under, after my little stint
With lesser causes, the flag of art.
See how proudly it waves over a workroom
Where the management puts its employees first.
No more crowding together in ill-lit basements.
Each of you will receive the elbow room you deserve
By a bright window that opens on a garden,
Happy in an establishment where means and methods
Are just as important as any end.
“Accept no substitutes.” That’s the motto
I’ve sewn in our union logo. “One sentence
Stitched with mindfulness says more than ten
Pasted together to meet a deadline.”
And here’s a clause in the contract I’m offering
That says whenever you feel weary from overuse
You can take off a month to get your strength back.
No need to worry that some scab of a synonym
Will be smuggled onto the payroll to do your job.
Imagine it, words: not to be asked anymore
To glorify causes you consider shameful
But to praise the beauty that’s been neglected,
To draw a map showing it’s not remote
But near to anyone willing to do some walking.
A map in your own style, your own inflections
Giving torque to the line or pushing out
Over the line to make room in the sentence
For canyons you won’t be asked to fill in,
For knolls you won’t be asked to smooth down.
World History
Better to wonder if ten thousand angels
Could waltz on the head of a pin
And not feel crowded than to wonder if now’s the time
For the armies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
To teach the Serbs a lesson they’ll never forget
For shooting Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.
Better to go door to door in Düsseldorf or Marseilles
And leave the taxpayers scratching their heads
At your vague report of a kingdom within
Than argue it’s time for Germany to display
A natural love for its Austrian kin, or time
For France to make good on its pledge to Russia,
Or time for England to honor its word to France
Or give up thinking itself a gentleman.
To wonder, after a month without one convert,
If other people exist, if they share the world
That you inhabit, if you’ve merely dreamed them
To keep from feeling lonely—that’s enough
To make the silence that falls when your words give out
A valley of shadows you fear to pass through.
But it can’t compare to the silence of bristling nations
Standing toe to toe in a field, each army certain
It couldn’t be anywhere else, given the need
Of great nations to be ready for great encounters.
And if it’s hard to believe that spirit
Is anything more than a word when defined
As something separate from what is mortal,
It’s easy to recognize the spirit of the recruit
Not convinced his honor has been offended
Who decides it’s time to step from the line
And catch a train back to his cottage
Deep in the boondocks, where his wife and daughter
Are waiting to serve him supper and hear the news.
The Actor
He doesn’t deny that confessing his limitations
Might serve as a useful prologue to moving forward,
Just not so useful as pretending to be accomplished.
On his list of virtues, ambition outranks sincerity.
It doesn’t matter how unpracticed he is
So long as he plays the part he chooses
As he imagines a great actor might play it.
It doesn’t matter if the
robe he borrows
Drags in the sawdust and his wooden sword
Jostles the table as he bends to outline,
On a fake map of a kingdom, his towns and forests.
Wanting to be a forester, he enters a forest.
Coming upon a river, he finds a canoe
And paddles off as if he knows what he’s doing.
When it tips as he turns, he pretends he can swim,
And soon he’s crawling ashore, winded,
To rest in the sun as his mother and father
Told him to rest after exertion
Back when they were playing the part of parents
More convincingly than they did when first
It was thrust upon them. Then it joined
Their ensemble of other impersonations
Practiced till all looked easy, carried off
With the kind of grace that deserves commending.
If their son acts like he’s happy to praise them
Often enough, however stingy he may be feeling,
He’ll be generous, according to his convictions,
Worthy of admiration from everyone;
Forced admiration, maybe, at first; then natural.
Dream Theory
Not every dream I wake from
Leaves me feeling uneasy.
Some are wishes pure and simple
That pass through customs unmolested.
My dream last night about traveling
With Lynne in Europe seemed to express
A wish uncompromised by the clamor of fact.
The thirty-year gap between the present
And the era in which I failed to persuade her
I was her destiny was an inch-wide crack
For my feelings to skip across
As they charged the gangway
With all our luggage, off for a voyage