summer classes

sige lang. sige lang. matatapos din yan.

2 poems by Stephen Dunn:

Aesthete

A fire has started in the kitchen,
and is moving from room to room.
There's just enough time
to save Rembrandt, an original,
or the portrait of your wife.
You save the Rembrandt, of course,
but when you get outside
you think it might be possible
to save the portrait as well.
You dash back in, and rescue
the portrait just before the flames
would have it as their own.
You're half way out the door now,
you're going to be fine
when you realize, oh no, your wife
has been up in the attic sorting through
memorabilia of your lifetime together.
How stupid of me, you say to yourself,
the Rembrandt or my actual wife-
that's what I neeeded to decide between.
How did I get it so wrong?

To a Friend Accused of a Crime
He May Have Committed

We'll never know for sure now,
you in your garage with the motor on
and the tailpipe clogged and the door closed,
three days before the trial. Your wife
found you after she found the note,
and this morning the numinous beauty
of low fog in our fields has taken on
a strange gloom, a lone deer grazing there
with an alertness that you must have had
many days of your life, lest you be caught.

For twenty-five years we knew you
to be a man who could charm a room,
yet stand up at a faculty meeting
and press an argument, not back down.
When we dined with you, you loved
to tell us all the places you'd been.
How stupid of you to allow
your computer to be repaired,
the hard facts on the hard drive-
all those boys, girls, this other life.

What brilliance, though, to have concealed it
for so long. And how nearby desperation
always must have been. I'll remember your face
now as a thing with a veil, what I so admire
in poker players. You were not one of those.
When word first got out, we called you,
said we were there for you. In our minds
your remained a friend. We didn't call again.

When does a friend cease being a friend?
After which betrayal, yours or ours?
Or do we just go on in the muck and the mud
holding ourselves up the best we can?
That's what we're asking ourselves,
the fog lifting a little, the newspaper
with your photo in it open on our table.