The Room by Stephen Dunn

 

The room has no choice.

Everything that’s spoken in it

it absorbs. And it must put up with

the bad flirt, the overly perfumed,

the many murderers of mood—

with whomever chooses to walk in.

If there’s a crowd, one person

is certain to be concealing a sadness,

another will have abandoned a dream,

at least one will be a special agent

for his own cause. And always

there’s a functionary,

somberly listing what he does.

The room plays no favorites.

Like its windows, it does nothing

but accommodate shades

of light and dark. After everyone leaves

(its entrance, of course, is an exit),

the room will need to be imagined

by someone, perhaps some me

walking away now, who comes alive

when most removed. He’ll know

from experience how deceptive

silence can be. 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.

by Stephen Dunn

3

Historically Speaking

It was a year of pirates in speedboats,
anonymous bullies spreading privacies
on the Internet, and the worst of them
doing worse than that and wishing to be known
for what they'd done, their perfidy
an advertisement for a cause.


Thus it was a bad year for historians,
whose stories couldn't be correct
for longer than a few days. More than ever
the imperfections of memory
would combine with the slipperiness
of documentation to produce versions
only people who need not be persuaded
could agree with.

It was a war
where the enemy sometimes was wearing
the same clothes as its opponent,
and both sides believed their cause
was righteous, and years from now the victors,
if we were unlucky, would tell it as it wasn't,

unless we were the victors, and our historians
would tell it from so many angles
that both was and wasn't
would read like a symphony of discordancies,
an honoring of so many counterpoints
that I, for one, might find a place to rest uneasy,
historically speaking, among all the bloodshed,
the horror, which would stop for a while and continue.

STEPHEN DUNN
The Paris Review
Winter 2016