Stories

Stephen Dunn (born June 24, 1939) is an American poet and educator. Dunn has written fifteen collections of poetry. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 2001 collection, Different Hours and has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among his other awards are three National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, Guggenheim Fellowship, and Rockefeller Foundations Fellowship. "Stories" by Stephen Dunn from Local Time, Quill Press, 1986. © Stephen Dunn. Reprinted with permission.

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It was back when we used to listen to stories,
     our minds developing
pictures as we were taken into the elsewhere

of our experience or to the forbidden
     or under the sea.
Television was wrestling, Milton Berle,

Believe It Or Not. We knelt before it
     like natives
in front of something sent by parachute,

but when grandfather said “I’ll tell you a story,”
     we stopped with pleasure,
sat crosslegged next to the fireplace, waited.

He’d sip gin and hold us, his voice
     the extra truth
beyond what we believed without question.

When grandfather died and changed
     what an evening meant,
it was 1954. After supper we went

to the television, innocents in a magic land
     getting more innocent,
a thousand years away from Oswald and the shock,

the end of our enormous childhood.
     We sat still
for anything, laughed when anyone slipped

or lisped or got hit with a pie. We said
     to our friends
“What the hey?” and punched them in the arms.

The television had arrived, and was coming.
     Throughout the country
all the grandfathers were dying,

giving their reluctant permission, like Indians.