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Next morning
on the phone to her—
the all of it
reduced to words—
How lovely the way
we redefined wrong.
Yes, she agreed,
then slowly, in a hush,
It went beyond
pleasure, beyond fun.
They laughed
without gaiety.
I feel numb, he said,
and hung up to begin
what he’d later describe
as a long slide into himself.
Conversation with others
seemed like chatter.
Work felt like work.
He’d call her up
and say things like Holy shit,
which she understood
to be accurate.
Stephen Dunn’s most recent book is What Goes On: Selected and New Poems 1995-2009. His Different Hours received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2001.
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