posts tagged "stephen dunn"

"…recite the list
of what you’ve learned to do without.
It is stronger than prayer.”
-Stephen Dunn, from “Traveling"

"Those who’ve gotten away from me:
read this, and call.
I wanted everything, or not enough;
it was all my fault.
-Stephen Dunn, “Loves’"

"The definition of beauty, Valéry said, is easy;
it’s what leads you to desperation.”
-Stephen Dunn, from “Meaninglessness"

"This is when the walls
start to breathe as if reclaiming the air,
when the withheld spills forth,
when even the chairs start to talk.”
-Stephen Dunn, from “The Room"

It was as if he had wings, and the wind
behind him. Even uphill the rock
seemed to move of its own accord.

Every road felt like a shortcut.

Sisyphus, of course, was worried;
he’d come to depend on his burden,
wasn’t sure who he was without it.

His hands free, he peeled an orange.
He stopped to pet a dog.
Yet he kept going forward, afraid
of the consequences of standing still.

He no longer felt inclined to smile.

It was then that Sisyphus realized
the gods must be gone, that his wings
were nothing more than a perception
of their absence.

He dared to raise his fist to the sky.
Nothing, gloriously, happened.

Then a different terror overtook him.

-Stephen Dunn, “Sisyphus and the Sudden Lightness”

Connubial

Because with alarming accuracy  
she’d been identifying patterns  
I was unaware of—this tic, that  
tendency, like the way I’ve mastered  
the language of intimacy  
in order to conceal how I felt—  

I knew I was in danger  
of being terribly understood.

Stephen Dunn

via rabbit-light

(Source: poetryfoundation.org)

"Starting to love this distance.
Starting to feel how present you are in it.”
-Stephen Dunn, from “Summer Nocturne"

"I’ve read books
that slowed down a life

long enough for me to enter it”

-Stephen Dunn, “Loveliness"

"If I love you, one of them cried out,
what would you give up?
There were others before you,
I wanted to say, and you’d be the one
before someone else. Everything, I said.”

-Stephen Dunn, “What They Wanted"

"there are no endings

people die between birthdays and go on for years;
what stops things for a moment
are the words you’ve found for the last bit of light
you think there is”

-Stephen Dunn, “What"