Worry

Worry


My friends, the worriers,
make themselves miserable,
I suppose, in preparation
for the misery to come.
They must be practicing for the time
lightning will destroy their houses,
or for when their spouses die
on that famous fog-plagued strip of road.
Bird flu
and if their hotel room will be
too close to the ice machine
often begin to live side by side
in their minds.
They can’t help it, they say,
these servants of catastrophe,
often adding that I seem to suffer
from underworry,
which causes them to worry
for and about me the more.
And so, since worry always trumps
the absence of worry,
to live with them
is to live on their terms.
Don’t worry
I’ve learned not to say,
which is other-planetary language
to them, cold, unsympathetic,
the language of someone whole
wouldn’t help them build a bomb shelter
after they’d seen the end of the world
in a dream.
Try to be reasonable,
is the button that triggers the bomb.
I try to love them
for their other qualities,
like being right about most other things,
or how good they are in the kitchen
or the workplace or the bed.
But if not for my sake,
then for their own, shouldn’t
they worry less, or at least privately?
Every once in a while
shouldn’t they say,
Forgive me my worries?
But a semi is always running a stop sign,
one of the big hemlocks topples in a storm.
Then they point to the world news.
What’s wrong with you, they want to know.
Don’t you know what’s out there?
A failure of imagination, they say.
A man who’s a clear danger to himself.


Stephen Dunn

Posted over on The American Poetry Review