Another Way To Breathe

This One Particular Page

in Dunn’s notebook starts
with a short story title I’ve forgotten.
Pause. Then comes the first poem
written after his wife’s death.

A moment later we’re shown another,
the first poem printed in his book Elegies:
‘Re-reading Katherine Mansfield’s
Bliss and Other Stories’.

It is almost funny, in the poem,
how the flattened fly punctuates
life in a book. This is the last
of the great paper archives.

The scholar carefully passes me
Dunn’s copy of the source book
Bliss. I hold it. An old object.
Do I think it will be funny?

‘Turn to the inside back’ he says,
‘and tell me what you see.’
‘The first draft of the poem,’ I say.
He commands me. ‘Read it.’

Starting slow, squinting in
at the black ink, biro I think,
handwritten loops, the bounce,
twirl, I read them, speeding up:

‘This is crossed out. There
is a circle drawn round that…’
Rawness is struck through,
replaced by structure, form.

Grief is formally rephrased
by a different time. I see
what I did not want to see
and choke on the final stanza.

‘Thank you,’ he says.
I pass the book along.
I cannot wait to run
out of the hall. Tears.

My face runs down the
street and I can only think
how much I want to tell you
this, how much I want

to tell you everything.