“The Year Before the Election”
It was a time when all the poets
seemed to be dying, my favorites
and a few I couldn’t bear.
I folded back everything I knew
into everything I thought I knew
until I was a man living in a world
of his own crazy postponements.
The weather there was calm,
then tempestuous, then calm again,
an inner weather I felt at the mercy of.
A good friend dropped out of my life
without explanation, wouldn’t answer
my letters or phone calls. A woman
wrote to me saying she was sorry;
I had no idea who she was.
Only a few of the now-dead poets
committed suicide, or drank themselves
into oblivion. Their deaths were blamed
on natural causes. What could be stranger?
A prolonged silence began. In the past
that might have meant an important conversation
was about to occur. It had, I was told,
but hardly any of us were ready to hear it.
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Reprinted from Pagan Virtues. Copyright (c) 2020 by Stephen Dunn. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
