Poem of the Week, by Stephen Dunn
A long time ago, I was showing someone around the 150 acres of woods and fields where I grew up. We were closing in on what my sisters and I always called the pine tree house, a small outdoor room-like space enclosed by sheltering pines where I kept a tiny table and stool and paper and pens. I loved and trusted this person and wanted to show them the pine tree house as a kind of beautiful surprise –it was an important place to me–but at the last minute I veered away and didn’t mention it, either then or later.
When I first read this poem, by the wondrous Stephen Dunn, I ducked my head and shrank in my chair even though no one else was home. That long ago day came shimmering back into my mind, how something in me needed to keep the place and what it revealed about me secret, only for myself.
A Secret Life, by Stephen Dunn
Why you need to have one
is not much more mysterious than
why you don’t say what you think
at the birth of an ugly baby.
Or, you’ve just made love
and feel you’d rather have been
in a dark booth where your partner
was nodding, whispering yes, yes,
you’re brilliant. The secret life
begins early, is kept alive
by all that’s unpopular
in you, all that you know
a Baptist, say, or some other
accountant would object to.
It becomes what you’d most protect
if the government said you can protect
one thing, all else is ours.
When you write late at night
it’s like a small fire
in a clearing, it’s what
radiates and what can hurt
if you get too close to it.
It’s why your silence is a kind of truth.
Even when you speak to your best friend,
the one who’ll never betray you,
you always leave out one thing;
a secret life is that important.
Click here for more information about Stephen Dunn.
alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my podcast
I’m teaching a Creative Writing Boot Camp this week. Six days in a row, seven hours a day, nineteen of us gather in a windowed classroom halfway between Minneapolis and St. Paul to write and write and talk and talk about the art and craft and act of writing. Poems and tiny short stories, tiny memoirs. Beautiful, painful, funny, wistful fragments of life, captured on paper and released into the invisible air of the room. I could teach for another fifty years and never lose this astonishment, that nurses and truck drivers and musicians and stay at home parents and hair stylists and sex workers and clerks and commodities traders and group home workers, Muslim and Christian and atheist, come together in a single small room and transform themselves and me and the whole outside world by the power of sharing stories. If a teacher asked me to name a sacred place, the classroom would be mine.
Alison McGhee 