The Dump
Dreamed between 1993 & 1999 by Thom Gunn
|
He died, and I admired
the crisp vehemence of a lifetime reduced to half a foot of shelf space. But others came to me saying, we too loved him, let us take you to the place of our love. So they showed me everything, everything-- a cliff of notebooks with every draft and erasure of every poem he published or rejected, thatched already with webs of annotation. I went in further and saw a hill of matchcovers from every bar or restaurant he'd ever entered. Trucks backed up constantly, piled with papers, awaited by archivists with shovels; forklifts bumped through trough and valley |
to adjust the spillage.
Here odors of rubbery sweat intruded on the pervasive smell of stale paper, no doubt from the mound of his collected sneakers. I clambered up the highest pile and found myself looking across not history but the vistas of a steaming range of garbage reaching to the coast itself. Then I lost my footing! and was carried down on a soft avalanche of letters, paid bills, sexual polaroids, and notes refusing invitations, thanking fans, resisting scholars. In nightmare I slid, no ground to stop me, until I woke at last where I had napped beside the precious half-foot. Beyond that, nothing, nothing at all. |
SOURCE: Collected Poems by Thom Gunn, edited by August Kleinzahler, 2007, pp. 99-100
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