I think I’m smelling the rain
we can smell before it rains.
It’s the odor of another world, I’m convinced,
and means nothing, yet here it is, and here
sweetly it comes
from the gray sky into the small openings.
—Stephen Dunn, “Afterlife”
The sweetness of another world arrives,
through the small openings, late, page 400
or so, but that’s where I’m starting,
in reverse—you stand up from your final bow,
arms return to your sides, waist unbends
and you smile
from the photo in the back matter—
I never realized how joyful you were
whenever you took
a stand, let the black oaks
machine-gun their acorns
at your head in its soft beret,
even leaned back, crossed your legs
in the rickety chair,
left your wife,
moved out of South Jersey
where you had seen so many
dead writers on the beaches
or on the train to Atlantic City,
their ghosts speaking to you.
That is how I feel now,
bringing you back alive
as the book rewinds,
your birthday poems
grow younger—
60, 50, 40—
and before long you’re back
at your first house,
next to the staircase that
leads nowhere,
the one you were always conjuring
in the ’90s,
page 159 now, when your early life
again begins to take shape—
decimated platters
of grapes and cheese
refill by the mouthful,
wine flows back into the bottle—
and I can see again
the stairs going up behind you,
I thought
they were abstract,
form without function,
art for art’s sake—
but now I understand them
as a symbol of your devout
atheism—your earthbound angels—
how did I miss that when you were alive,
you are even more alive
on page 75, lifting your fork
and knife, and on page 30
you are nothing more than a
breath of wildflowers,
invasive ones, your love of beauty
with a little ugly in it—
the kind spit out
by your neighbor Tony,
when someone scratched his Maserati:
beautiful, fucking beautiful
and I want to keep going,
you say yes
and start building the staircase—
it was you all along—
and page 2, page 1,
undoing the top stair, and then the prior,
until you’re standing on the floor of your living room,
just looking around, like I’m doing now,
in this place that hasn’t been imagined yet,
the not yet fallen world.