Sweetness - Stephen Dunn

Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear

one more friend

waking with a tumor, one more maniac

with a perfect reason, often a sweetness

has come

and changed nothing in the world

except the way I stumbled through it,

for a while lost

in the ignorance of loving

someone or something, the world shrunk

to mouth-size,

hand-size, and never seeming small.

I acknowledge there is no sweetness

that doesn’t leave a stain,

no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet…

Tonight a friend called to say his lover

was killed in a car

he was driving. His voice was low

and guttural, he repeated what he needed

to repeat, and I repeated

the one or two words we have for such grief

until we were speaking only in tones.

Often a sweetness comes

as if on loan, stays just long enough

to make sense of what it means to be alive,

then returns to its dark

source. As for me, I don’t care

where it’s been, or what bitter road

it’s traveled
to come so far, to taste so good.  

All poetry is amazing, there's no doubt about that. But there's something about this poem that makes it stand out from the rest, at least for me. This human life, with all its unreliability and impermanence, is fraught with tragedy. All the bad, dark, evil things in the world seem to cast a shadow that's too wide for the good things to beat back. What chance does happiness have when it's surrounded by death and hatred and jealousy? But maybe we look for happiness in the wrong places. Maybe happiness isn't accompanied by a cavalcade of blaring trumpets and flared banners to announce its arrival. Maybe it chooses the quiet and unsuspecting moments in our lives to make itself known but because they're not the obvious ones, we tend to miss them. I think it's this silent happiness that steals up on us that Stephen Dunn has referred to as sweetness in his poem. 

It's the feeling you get when you're on the last leg of a road trip, sipping makeshift tea made from a hot-water thermos and teabags, listening to your parents talking about what life used to be like back in the day and the sound of your sisters sleeping, when you've been driving for four straight hours and all you want to do is just drive into your neighborhood, and see your porch light on. It's the feeling you get when you've been up all night talking to a friend and as you both get sleepier and sleepier, you start talking in tones rather than in words but you can understand each other anyway, and perhaps better than you've ever been able to. Or when you're up on the roof alone, watching the sunset and the crows cawing all around you and the occasional bat fluttering past and thinking that you've survived through all the bullshit that's happened, and you still have got your entire life to live. If you grab hold of this happiness...that sweetness...at the right moment, it's exhilarating, and all the dark, depressing parts of life seem trivial and silly in comparison. I guess the saying is true:  

"Happiness is like a butterfly: the more you chase it, the more it will elude you. But if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder."

 ~ Thoreau