Coming to This

By Mark Strand b. 1934 Mark Strand

We have done what we wanted.

We have discarded dreams, preferring the heavy industry

of each other, and we have welcomed grief

and called ruin the impossible habit to break.

And now we are here.

The dinner is ready and we cannot eat.

The meat sits in the white lake of its dish.

The wine waits.

Coming to this

has its rewards: nothing is promised, nothing is taken away.

We have no heart or saving grace,

no place to go, no reason to remain.

Source: Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990)

Biography

Mark Strand is recognized as one of the premier contemporary American poets as well as an accomplished editor, translator and prose writer. The hallmarks of his style are precise language, surreal imagery, and the recurring theme of absence and negation; later collections investigate ideas of the self with pointed, often urbane wit. Named the U.S. Poet Laureate in 1990, Strand’s career has spanned nearly four decades, and he has . . .

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