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I Dare You

1952 –

It’s autumn, and we’re getting rid
of books, getting ready to retire,
to move some place smaller, more
manageable. We’re living in reverse,
age-proofing the new house, nothing
on the floors to trip over, no hindrances
to the slowed mechanisms of our bodies,
a small table for two. Our world is
shrinking, our closets mostly empty,
gone the tight skirts and dancing shoes,
the bells and whistles. Now, when
someone comes to visit and admires
our complete works of Shakespeare,
the hawk feather in the open dictionary,
the iron angel on a shelf, we say
take them. This is the most important
time of all, the age of divestment,
knowing what we leave behind is
like the fragrance of blossoming trees
that grows stronger after
you’ve passed them, breathing
them in for a moment before
breathing them out. An ordinary
Tuesday when one of you says
I dare you, and the other one
just laughs.

The author of several collections of poetry, Dorianne Laux was the recipient of the Oregon Book Award and a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Award for her book Facts About the Moon. She was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2020.

Themes

About this Poem

“‘I Dare You’ was written while in the midst of downsizing from a large house in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I taught at North Carolina State for thirteen years, to a small home in California where we retired. I had a party for my grad students and told them they could survey the house and take anything that caught their eye or fancy. They filed out the door with a white lace parasol, a red sequined cocktail dress, a tin angel, throw pillows, canned vegetables, rolled up rugs, pictures, potted plants, towels, posters and coasters of Dolly Parton, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, and Cher, the dining room table, and a roll of toilet paper. It was exhilarating! All that ‘stuff’ gone from my life. I’m a poet, so I wrote a poem about it. But it’s also a poem about aging and accepting that you too will be carried out like a broken lamp and buried in the dump we call a graveyard, or scattered into a plot of land, or poured out over the ocean. This exodus was somehow a preparation for the acceptance of this fact. I did not expect the final line, but when it came, I knew that other world I had belonged to was coming to a close. Youth. Remember when you’d do anything on a dare? On a whim? And that feeling of Why not? Poof. What remains between us is mirth.”
—Dorianne Laux

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More by this poet

What’s Broken

The slate black sky. The middle step
of the back porch. And long ago

my mother’s necklace, the beads
rolling north and south. Broken

the rose stem, water into drops, glass
knobs on the bedroom door. Last summer’s

pot of parsley and mint, white roots
shooting like streamers through the cracks.

Dorianne Laux

2007

Emily Said

Emily said she heard a fly buzz
when she died, heard it whizz
over her head, troubling her frizzed
hair. What will I hear? Showbiz
tunes on the radio, the megahertz
fuzz when the station picks up Yaz,
not the Hall-of-Famer or the Pez
of contraceptives, but the jazzy
flash-in-the-pan '80's techno-pop star, peach fuzz
on her rouged cheeks singing Pal-ease
Don't Go through a kazoo. Will my old love spritz
the air with the perfume of old roses,
buy me the white satin Mercedes-Benz

Dorianne Laux

2011

I Never Wanted to Die

It’s the best part of the day, morning light sliding
down rooftops, treetops, the birds pulling themselves
up out of whatever stupor darkened their wings,
night still in their throats.

Dorianne Laux

2021

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I Dare You

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