This entry is part of Getaway Reads, a weekly e-mail series curated by Stephanie Cawley that features the writing of the Winter Poetry & Prose Getaway faculty.
 
 

The Imagined

by Stephen Dunn

If the imagined woman makes the real woman
seem bare-boned, hardly existent, lacking in
gracefulness and intellect and pulchritude,
and if you come to realize the imagined woman
can only satisfy your imagination, whereas
the real woman with all her limitations
can often make you feel good, how, in spite
of knowing this, does the imagined woman
keep getting into your bedroom, and joining you
at dinner, why is it that you always bring her along
on vacations when the real woman is shopping,
or figuring the best way to the museum?

                                And if the real woman

has an imagined man, as she must, someone
probably with her at this very moment, in fact
doing and saying everything she’s ever wanted,
would you want to know that he slips in
to her life every day from a secret doorway
she’s made for him, that he’s present even when
you’re eating your omelette at breakfast,
or do you prefer how she goes about the house
as she does, as if there were just the two of you?
Isn’t her silence, finally, loving? And yours
not entirely self-serving? Hasn’t the time come,
once again, not to talk about it?
 

Cleaning Up

by Stephen Dunn

Learning to be gracious, sorrow-freed,
ten years beyond the old rut
of needless suffering, I wanted to kiss the hands
of Nadezhda Mandelstam and Nelson Mandela,
and be done with those greats
as well as the difficulties they triumphed over.
I didn’t want to be brave, or safe.
I resolved never to fake joy,
or pursue old grief. If I encountered opacity,
I’d try to smash it with clarity.
But someone always seemed to be giving me
something wonderful, and I wasn’t going to
complain that I didn’t know why.
I wanted no nostalgia for a landscape
that couldn’t be retrieved,
but did want to be a revealer of secrets
that would unlock the faraway, the unknown.
I wouldn’t want to have the boredom
of immortality, or the hijinks of living
a life of regular chutzpah and dazzle.
The question existed, Why would it matter
what I want or not want?
And the answer is: It would matter to me.
I am he who fiddles on the stoops
of a house in his city, and watches girls
dance around manholes in the street.
I am the one who keeps playing
while the weather encroaches.
Don’t expect from me fidelity
to any one thing. Every day, if I could,
I’d oppose history by altering one detail.
 

© Stephen Dunn. “The Imagined” was originally published in The New Yorker, March 14, 2011.

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Stephen Dunn’s seventeenth volume of poetry, Falling Backwards into the World, was released by Jane Street Press at the 2012 Winter Poetry & Prose Getaway. His previous books include Different Hours, which was awarded the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Here and Now(2011), both from W.W. Norton. Stephen has received awards and fellowships from American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Magazine, NJ State Council on the Arts, Poetry Northwest, Mid-American Review, and many others. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, but spends most of his time in Frostburg, Maryland, with his wife, the writer Barbara Hurd. You can read and listen to some of his poems here.

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Want to study with Stephen Dunn? At the 2013 Winter Poetry & Prose Getaway, Stephen will lead three special sessions of Advanced Poetry Writing. Click here to find out more.

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Advance your craft and energize your writing at the Winter Poetry & Prose Getaway. Enjoy challenging and supportive sessions, insightful feedback, and an encouraging community. Learn more.