Vox Populi
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Stephen Dobyns: Prague
The day I learned my wife was dying
I told myself if anyone said, Well, she had
a good life, I’d punch him in the nose.
How much life represents a good life?
Maybe a hundred years, which would
give us nearly forty more to visit Oslo
and take the train to Vladivostok,
learn German to read Thomas Mann
in the original. Even more baseball games,
more days at the beach and the baking
of more walnut cakes for family birthdays.
How much time is enough time? How much
is needed for all these unspent kisses,
those slow walks along cobbled streets?
Copyright 2016 Stephen Dobyns. From The Day’s Last Light Reddens the Leaves of the Copper Beech (BOA 2016).
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Another poem about kisses. (Laure-Anne’s, too). My late year resolution is to kiss my darling as much as I can.
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Yes, let us love each other.
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Dobyns does wonders here. This sonnet moved me right from the get-go. The three line setting of the mood and situation, then the fourth line asking a rhetorical question about what can have created a good life in response to facing the finale of that life, or through its magical extension.
Dobyns writes us a series of images of how to transform the question into meaningful life experiences, if perhaps given enough time. But then he re-asks his rhetorical question: how much time is enough time? Unspent kisses and lovely walks imply there is no sure answer. Grief can pull us this way and that. Situations, rhetoric and imagery spice the poem, but the answer to his rhetoric remains a mystery, like memories of Prague visited or not. Felt, perhaps, but not here told.
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Lovely exegesis, Jim. The poem is deceptively simple on the surface but, as you point out, plunges to unexpected depths.
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I did an interview with Dobyns some years back. He appeared a quiet, thoughtful man full of good humor. I love his work, both poetry and novels. He is a writers writer… so easy to fall in love with his writing. I have a feeling he’s writing from the heart in this poem, and that makes me very sad for life Is short, and life is long, and both are true.
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Thanks, Stellasue.
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I love Stephen Dobyns’ work — his poems, his novels, and his **fabulous** Best Word, Best Order (2nd Edition) Essays on Craft taught me so much! Some of his poems can break your heart…
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Yes, Stephen is my teacher and my friend.
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I love Dobyns’ poems for their clarity and directness. No one else can raise normal speech into poetry as well as he can.
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I love Stephen Dobyns’ work. His work always reaches deep.
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Yes… how much life, how hungry are we? Still, with all its unexpected curve balls, every life has been a good life, and every life is cut too short. A very moving poem.
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such a beautiful, heartfelt poem
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