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      February 28, 2025Reading Your Posthumous Collection BackwardWendy Cannella

      I think I’m smelling the rain
      we can smell before it rains.
      It’s the odor of another world, I’m convinced,
      and means nothing, yet here it is, and here
      sweetly it comes
      from the gray sky into the small openings.
      —Stephen Dunn, “Afterlife”

      The sweetness of another world arrives,
            through the small openings, late, page 400
      or so, but that’s where I’m starting,
       
      in reverse—you stand up from your final bow,
          arms return to your sides, waist unbends
                    and you smile
       
      from the photo in the back matter—
      I never realized how joyful you were
      whenever you took
       
            a stand,        let the black oaks
      machine-gun their acorns
          at your head in its soft beret,
       
      even leaned back, crossed your legs
              in the rickety chair,
                          left your wife,
       
          moved out of South Jersey
                    where you had seen so many
        dead writers on the beaches
       
      or on the train to Atlantic City,
                    their ghosts speaking to you.
          That is how I feel now,
       
                  bringing you back alive
        as the book rewinds,
                          your birthday poems
       
      grow younger—
                    60, 50, 40—
                          and before long you’re back
       
        at your first house,
                            next to the staircase that
                      leads nowhere,
       
      the one you were always conjuring
      in the ’90s,
          page 159 now,    when your early life
       
      again    begins to take shape—
      decimated platters
                    of grapes and cheese
       
      refill by the mouthful,
        wine flows back into the bottle—
            and I can see again
       
        the stairs going up behind you,
      I thought
                they were abstract,
       
                form without function,
      art for art’s sake—
                but now I understand them
       
      as a symbol of your devout
                atheism—your earthbound angels—
        how did I miss that when you were alive,
       
                          you are even more alive
      on page 75, lifting your fork
                      and knife, and on page 30
       
      you are nothing more than a
                            breath of wildflowers,
      invasive ones, your love of beauty
       
      with a little ugly in it—
                            the kind spit out
      by your neighbor Tony,
       
      when someone scratched his Maserati:
                  beautiful, fucking beautiful
      and I want to keep going,
       
      you say yes
        and start building the staircase—
                                it was you all along—
       
                  and page 2, page 1,
          undoing the top stair, and then the prior,
      until you’re standing on the floor of your living room,
       
                just looking around, like I’m doing now,
      in this place that hasn’t been imagined yet,
                                          the not yet fallen world.

      from #86 – Winter 2024

      Wendy Cannella

      “I wish a poem could bring a lost loved one back to life. Or save a democracy, heal a climate, so on—it’s a long list, all that I would ask a poem to do. When I moved to New Jersey as a teenager, I checked two books out of the library—Anne Sexton’s Transformations and Stephen Dunn’s Between Angels. I was 15 with dark eyeliner—Sexton should have been my jam, and sure, I can still recite most of her ‘Cinderella’ by heart—but somehow it was Stephen’s voice that spoke to me, directly. I’m certain all of his readers feel this way. When I learned that he lived nearby and taught at a local college, the rest became my origin story. This elegy can’t bring Stephen back, but I hope it carries forward what I learned from him in the wilds of South Jersey—that sometimes a poem can bring the living back to life—can return us to ourselves, remind us to build something that feels like home.”

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