From The Monastery of Work and Love: From an Upstairs Window, and: After Losses

From The Monastery of Work and Love · Stephen Dunn From an Upstairs Window: Night, and outside a whippoorwill pronouncing its name. Madeline off in another room sleeping with her paintings. "Better company," she said, and slammed the door. So it starts again, the old original condition, an overrated moon up above and the dark so palpable I could mistake color for density, reach up and try to hold on. On the easel down the hall something unfinished I've been finishing for weeks. On the desk, a poem about the unfinished painting, unfinished too. Lamentations make a certain kind of person happy, and I introduce myself— he that luxuriates in wounds that bring stitches and salve. Let the clouds come now, as if to visit. Everything might then seem perfect, like twins who hate each other in matching clothes. THEMISSOURIREVIEW · 25 After Losses · Stephen Dunn For J.P. Around the time the living room became unbearable to look at I took in two cats, a gray and a gray. It was after the dog died and the house was getting smaller. It was after I rowed the small boat into the seascape on the wall; after I invented the small boat. The cats ended all of that, for a while. I was happy to watch them, their speed and lassitude, how when they were asleep I could touch them awake. But I began to hear the ho-hum in each purr. I was witness to the energy that misplaces itself until it's gone. Mine, not theirs. My dream: lying back with a superficial wound, every hour a nurse's breast glancing my arm. Such a nice passivity that finally isn't a life. Circles everywhere looked like zeroes to me. I write this for you who is surrounded by it now, the stasis that won't end, these afternoons when there's nothing to say and you say it in order to survive. I want to tell you it ends, it just goes away. I remember a twitch in a vein— as if something lost were tapping on a wallno , it wasn't that mystical. I remember something like joy coming with a fat pillow of its own . . . no; it ends, it just goes away. 26 ¦ THEMISSOURIREVIEW ...