Saturday, November 25, 2006

...how comforting
it must be to have a business card -
Manager, Specialist - and believe what it says.

Who, in fact, didn't want his most useful name
to enter with him,
when he entered a room, who didn't want to be

that kind of lie? A man who was a sweetheart
and a son-of-a-bitch
was also more or less every name

he'd ever been called, and when you die, he thought,
that's when it happens,
you're collected forever into a few small words.

Stephen Dunn

2 comments:

Harish Suryanarayana said...

Thats far more disturbing than comforting !

neha said...

i dont know, i usually find confusion more distressing than most kinds of certainity (easier to deal with). i think it would be comforting to give your self a name and a position (via the business card) than let people decide that for you. the poem opens with the lines -
"He'd spent his life trying to control the names
people gave him;
oh the unfair and the accurate equally hurt."

but i can also see how it can be really disturbing - the mould would be set and you are fixed with an image - claustrophobic