Keeper of Limits: The Mrs. Cavendish Poems. Stephen Dunn
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the New Jersey suburbs
where they moved to escape
her friends, and join his.
She was young, and had a sense
of what could be called waspy fun.
She’d never met anyone like him.
Both of them kept me off balance in those days.
When I’d visit I’d find myself half-beguiled,
half-annoyed, by how she’d tell lies
about things we’d experienced together.
But what could I do? She was in the act
of becoming Mrs. Cavendish, and I knew
from then on I’d keep her past
in the same closed-up closet
where I kept my own dark secrets.
In that way her husband and I became
keepers of her preferred memories.
He knew I loved her, but thought of me
as an adoring remnant, essentially prehistoric.
The truth is always different
from what anyone says out loud,
but who really cares? Not I, said the man
I chose to be, nor I nor I nor I—
among the many of us she left teetering.
The Young Mrs. Cavendish
Because back then she accepted
almost any problem as the normal state of things
she thought the homeless and the affluent
were just part of the landscape, inevitable as storms
and sunsets. It was easy, she said, such thinking,
and when it wasn’t, it simply wasn’t. I felt like
disavowing her right there, but I rarely knew
what to do in her presence,
found it hard to resist the lilt of her voice,
her blithe carelessness. When she began to use the word
spiritual as if it were something you could study for,
like citizenship, I should have collapsed into laughter.
Let’s embrace our ignorance, I finally said to her,
half-aware I was revealing my own brand of sanctimony.
I remembered for both of us how pleased she was
when we discussed Ayn Rand and free enterprise,
and those years she instructed others in the art
of selfishness. Let the poor work harder,
she’d say, let the strong get stronger. She’d cite
Howard Roark as her man of the hour, would tell
anyone who’d listen that Adam Smith eats Marx
for breakfast. Then she went to college, and there
was the world, fraught with complications
of competing ideas. Now she says
she was an idiot, hadn’t yet tripped over herself
in pursuit of an idea, or lost a job, or had to rely
on the kindness of the unambitious. It took forever
before she could separate the shit from the shinola.
Mrs. Cavendish’s Lament
I was good all day and did what I was supposed to.
Mrs. Cavendish’s Politics
Because she came to believe that everyone
had the right to be heard, but not necessarily
the right to be taken seriously, she was trusted
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