The Arm by Stephen Dunn
When I read today’s poem in 180 More, I was reminded of this poem about dolls. Stephen Dunn has nothing on Margaret Atwood in the creepy doll contest, but that’s probably a good thing.
The Arm
By Stephen Dunn
A doll’s pink, broken-off arm
was floating in a pond
the man had come to with his dog.
The arm had no sad child nearby
to say it was hers, no parent to rescue it
with a stick or branch,
and this pleased the man to whom
absence always felt like opportunity.
He imagined a girl furious
at her younger sister, taking it out on her
one limb at a time.
Yet the sun was glancing off
the arm’s little pink fingers,
and the pond’s heart-shaped lily pads
seemed to accentuate an oddness,
which he thought beautiful.
When he and the dog looked for
the doll’s body but couldn’t find it,
a different image came to him,
of a father who hated the fact
that his son liked dolls.
What was floating there
was a punishment that didn’t work,
for the boy had come to love
his one-armed doll even more.
The man was struck once again
by how much misery
the human spirit can absorb.
His dog wanted to move on,
enough of this already.
But the man was creating little waves
with his hands, and the arm, this thing
his wife was sure to question,
was slowly bobbing toward him.
