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Dismantling the House

By Stephen Dunn b. 1939 Stephen Dunn

Rent a flatbed with a winch.

With the right leverage

anything can be hoisted, driven off.

Or the man with a Bobcat comes in,

then the hauler with his enormous truck.

A leveler or a lawyer does the rest;

experts always are willing to help.

The structure was old, rotten in spots.

Hadn't it already begun to implode?

Believe you've just sped the process up.

Photographs, toys, the things that break

your heart—let's trust

they would have been removed,

perhaps are safe with the children

who soon will have children of their own.

It's over. It's time for loss to build

its tower in the yard where you

are merely a spectator now.

Admit you'd like to find something

discarded or damaged, even gone,

and lift it back into the world.

Source: Poetry (February 2003).

Biography

Poet Stephen Dunn was born in 1939 in New York City. The first of his family to go to college, Dunn attended Hofstra University on a basketball scholarship and later worked in advertising. In an interview with Poets and Writers, Dunn discussed the leap from being an ad-man to poet: “My first job out of college was writing in-house brochures for Nabisco in New York, and I kept getting promoted. I was in danger, literally, of . . .

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