WATCHING YOUR WORLD

FALL APART

by Susan Dunn
1 Fine Day 2000

Architecture by Acker

I’d never really wondered what held my life together. If you’d have asked me, I suppose I would have said "Superglue?" "Me?"

If you’d asked me what was the most important thing in my life, I’d have said “my kids.” If you’d asked me what kept me going, I’d have said “my kids.”

But I thought I held my life together. After all, I was the mother, the lynchpin, the top of the food chain, the person who kept it all going.

This feeling, now that my son has died, of my world having fallen inviolate tells me differently. My kids held my world together. Just like it was they who nurtured and comforted me,not vice versa

And also a few basic inviolate notions such as:

· my children will be alive my entire life

· my children will bury me, I will not bury them

· everyone knows having your child die is ‘the worst thing that can happen,’ so of course that will never happen to me

I had made no provisions in case any of those things happened, because I couldn’t conceive of them happening, and I still can’t. They just don’t fit into my paradigm, as they say, even after they’ve happened.

Call it denial if you will, and it’s an absurdly huge thing to be denying, but I still have this cosmic feeling of ‘it didn’t happen’ because if it did, I’d never live through it.

That’s how hard it is, and that’s how hard it is to swallow. So elements of my life have gone flying out into the ionosphere and I live in a state of sort of suspended animation and watch it go in disbelief. I wonder how long this will go on.

“Wonder” has become part of my vocabulary, not in the good way. I’m like some bug plastered against the hood of the car flapping my wings, not really sure what’s happened, and with no idea what to do about it.

Susan Dunn's poetry is a window into another reality. Like all great poets, she describes the unseen aspects of our plane of existence, the things that are just below the threshhold of seeing, hearing, touching and knowing.Reading one of her poems pulls these threshhold experiences into focus for a moment, expanding our perspective on reality in the process. We return refreshed, as though from a visit to a faraway land.