This is poetry moment on WPSU – a weekly program featuring the work of contemporary Pennsylvania poets. Your host is poet and author Marjorie Maddox, a 2023 Monson Arts Fellow, and professor of English and creative writing at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University.
—
If you’re like me, you have in your house a drawer or two that are “junk” magnets. Odds and ends gravitate there. And yet sometimes, what seem to others like insignificant objects are, to us, treasured possessions. In today’s poem, “Nightstand,” David Swerdlow explains why.
Since 1990, David Swerdlow has taught literature and creative writing at Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania. He is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, including Nightstand (Broadstone Books, 2023). His work has appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, West Branch and elsewhere other distinguished journals and anthologies. Twice a recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant, Swerdlow has served as a Fulbright Professor of American Literature in Peru, as a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, and as visiting faculty on two Semester at Sea voyages.
A stone, a pocketknife, a father’s old pair of glasses: yes, objects can be synonymous with memory, a way to honor and remember the people we love and the moments we’ve spent together. In this moving meditation on family, love, and loss, David Swerdlow examines what he cannot bear to let go.
Here’s —
Nightstand
Next to my bed, a worn book
with a black jacket preserves
my thumbprint that dulls
the cover’s finish, a fleeting
medallion showing love, not
possession. There’s also a stone
my daughter carried home
from Bhutan, a cliffside monastery
painted on the stone’s surface
smoothed by a river in which no one swims
because it’s holy. She gave me the stone
that fits in my hand, the size
of the mouse I hear some nights
running the bedroom walls. Inside
the nightstand’s drawer, all the things
I cannot part with: my father’s voice
recorded on a tape I don’t know
if I still have the machine to play
and four pairs of his glasses
in black leather cases, even
a eulogy I don’t remember but keep
because what else can you do
with what honors the dead? My love
would like me to get rid of whatever
I don’t need, if need is defined by use,
but it’s only a small table
and I’ve kept only what I find
sacred. If I float through
nights I never figured I could
survive, I’m working
on what’s holy, pinning it
to the ceiling that holds on
to nothing but the dark I hear
running through everything
I own—the old coins, the pocketknife,
the tie-clip, the loss.
- - -
That was “Nightstand” by David Swerdlow.
Listen for Poetry Moment with Marjorie Maddox Mondays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on WPSU. You can more episodes at WPSU.org/poetry moment.
Our theme music is by Eric Ian Farmer.