Keeper of Limits: The Mrs. Cavendish Poems. Stephen Dunn

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