"Sweetness," by Stephen Dunn

Here, have a perfect poem for these troubling times. It seems that each week, sometimes each day, someone I know is losing someone, something important. I can't read the news the past few weeks, I just can't; I'm numb and in denial about it all. I have not yet begun to assimilate, to mourn. But there are other things than loss to life, of course, even if it is hard to see it some days. Stephen Dunn is absolutely one of my favorite poets, and this is why:

Sweetness

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.