Home > Poetry Magazine > Chord

Poetry Magazine

POEM
RELATED CONTENT Discover this poem's context and related poetry.

Chord

By Stuart Dybek b. 1942 Stuart Dybek

A man steps out of sunlight,

sunlight that streams like grace,

still gaping at blue sky

staked across the emptiness of space,

into a history where shadows

assume a human face.

A man slips into silence

that began as a cry,

still trailing music

although reduced to the sigh

of an accordion

as it folds into its case.

"Chord" from Streets in Their Own Ink. Copyright © 2004 byStuart Dybek. Used with the permission of Farrar Straus & Giroux, LLC.

Source: Poetry (March 2001).

Biography

Poet and fiction writer Stuart Dybek was born in 1942 and raised on the South Side of Chicago. He attended Loyola University in Chicago and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His collections of poetry include Brass Knuckles (1979) and Streets in Their Own Ink (2004). His works of fiction, including the short story collections Childhood and Other Neighborhoods (1980) and The Coast of Chicago (1990), and the novel-in-stories I Sailed . . .

Continue reading this biography