"Swifts"
Listen to Dan Chiasson read this poem.
1. Fist
It is impossible for me to remember
the cozy room I slept in as a child.
Somebody made my bed up to be paradise.
It was hard for me, a hard night, when I entered art.
The tendons in my wrist are visible.
What will I do now I have made this fist?
To loosen it feels weird, anticlimactic—
a misuse, a misunderstanding, of fists.
That's how it was with me that night.
And so, mysteriously, I lost my sweetness.
Weird, to feel intended for violence,
when what I wanted was an hour of rest.
2. Wind
Find some other reason to sway, forest;
old people get bent over
from vitamin deficiencies; trees,
take them as your inspiration.
For I have neither time nor energy
any longer to write poems, to make feeling
out of what, without me, is silent;
I find your standing there disgusting.
And you, reader, I see you nod your head,
treelike, appraising these lines;
I find your standing there—
not disgusting, but not inspiring either.
3. Tree
Dan Chiasson's poems appear in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Threepenny Review, and elsewhere.
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