A Coldness by Stephen Dunn

I don't know if it's a coldness
or just how the body, overloaded,
tends to shut down,
but as my brother neared death
I felt nothing that resembled grief.
Our unfinished business
finished long ago, our love
for each other spoken and real,
there wasn't much more to say
but goodbye, and one morning
we said it-- a small moment--
and one of us cried.
From then on he was delusional,
the cancer making him
stupid, insistently so, and lost.
I wanted him to die.
And I wished his wife
would say A shame
instead of God's will. Or if God
had such a will, Shame on Him.
Day's later, at the viewing,
again I wanted to feel something,
but for whom? That powdered stranger
lying there, that nobody I knew?
I was far away, parsing grief,
turning it over in my mind.
He was simply gone, a dead thing,
anybody's sack of bones.
Only when his son spoke,
measuring with precise, slow-
to-arrive language the father
he had lost, did something in me move.
There was my brother restored,
abstracted, made of words now.

Pedagogical by Stephen Dunn

In a history paper in college I said the period
between the tsars and Leninism
was a period of transition, and my professor
wrote in the margin, "All periods in history
are periods of transition." I learned nothing
from that, except that he was a wiseguy,
a show-off, someone I would not take again.

Two years later, in a course that focused on Stalin
called The History of Power, I wrote
passionately and I thought persuasively
that much of what he'd done was "inhuman."
In the margin, the response that may be the beginning
of my intellectual life: "Stephen, when it comes
to things like that, human will do just fine."

Now, Finally by Stephen Dunn

Now, finally, a matter of something else,
the delusions of choosing
behind each of you, and those people
you married or didn't marry
also behind you,
because you knew too little
about love, or counted on it too much

as if love could ever be enough,

though without it, no hope, no renewals
when the disappointments come,
no passage through the kitchen slop
the boredom and the bills
to some higher regard.

I've seen that good glow
emanating unfakable,

but the past won't wholly disappear,
it can't,
you're everything you've ever done,
everyone you've known,

and for a while, yes, everything, everyone,
gets into bed with you. It's dark
under the covers and it's warm.
Hold on to each other-- those others
will go their ghostly ways.