How many of us would have the gumption to quit our day job for the silly reason that we hated it? How many of us would be able to stick it to The Man without immediately getting down on our knees and blaming it on a bad shrimp at lunch or a skipped pharmaceutical? The answer is, I think, not many. But Stephen Dunn is one of the proud few.
I first heard Dunn’s work in the voice of Garrison Keillor, that gentle satirist of NPR fame, in a Writer’s Almanac segment. I found myself clutching the steering wheel with something – joy, jealousy, an agony of recognition. Whatever it was, I still feel it when I read this poem, from his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Different Hours, which I rushed out to buy that very day.
I don’t why Stephen Dunn isn’t more famous. Maybe he avoids it. Maybe he’s shy and that’s why he hides out in New Jersey. I must admit, I secretly resent the fact that I’ve never had to opportunity to see him read.
But I forgive him, because of this poem. I forgive him, in fact, because of the whole wonderful book, as well as the terrific bits of criticism and essays on the making of poetry found in APR and other magazines. Yes, if Stephen Dunn has to camp out under his couch for months like a cat whose been threatened with a squirt gun in order to write these poems, so be it. So be it.
The Last Hours
There’s some innocence left,
and these are the last hours of an empty afternoon
at the office, and there’s the clock
on the wall, and my friend Frank
in the adjacent cubicle selling himself
on the phone.
I’m twenty-five, on the shaky
ladder up, my father’s son, corporate,
clean-shaven, and I know only what I don’t want,
which is almost everything I have.
A meeting ends.
Men in serious suits, intelligent men
who’ve been thinking hard about marketing snacks,
move back now to their window offices, worried
or proud. The big boss, Horace,
has called them in to approve this, reject that –
the big boss, a first-name, how’s-you-family
kind of assassin, who likes me.
It’s 1964.
The sixties haven’t begun yet. Cuba is a larger name
than Vietnam. The Soviets are behind
everything that could be wrong. Where I sit
it’s exactly nineteen minutes to five. My phone rings.
Horace would like me to stop in
before I leave. Stop in. Code words,
leisurely words, that mean now.
Would I be willing
to take this on? Would X’s office, who by the way
is no longer with us, be satisfactory?
About money, will this be enough?
I smile, I say yes and yes and yes,
but – I don’t know from what calm place
this comes – I’m translating
his beneficence into a lifetime, a life
of selling snacks, talking snack strategy,
thinking snack thoughts.
On the elevator down
it’s a small knot, I’d like to say, of joy.
That’s how I tell it now, here in the future,
the fear long gone.
By the time I reach the subway it’s grown,
it’s outsized, an attitude finally come round,
and I say it quietly to myself, I quit,
and keep saying it, knowing I will say it, sure
of nothing else but.
--Stephen Dunn, from Different Hours (2000)
