Tenderness - Stephen Dunn

 Today's is another by Stephen Dunn (1939 - ), from his seventh book of poetry.  I think you'll agree, after reading, that the poem itself is written with great tenderness and that bittersweet quality of learning a truth almost too late to be of use.  Read it once "ignoring" the line breaks so that the narrative of the story is clear, and then again noting them, both visually and sounded aloud.  I am particularly taken by how it "turns" at the end, with the narrator understanding now what he didn't before.
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Tenderness

Back then when so much was clear

         and I hadn’t learned

young men learn from women

what it feels like to feel just right,

         I was twenty-three,

she thirty-four, two children, a husband

in prison for breaking someone’s head.

         Yelled at, slapped

around, all she knew of tenderness

was how much she wanted it, and all

         I knew

were back seats and a night or two

in a sleeping bag in the furtive dark.

         We worked

in the same office, banter and loneliness

leading to the shared secret

         that to help

National Biscuit sell biscuits

was wildly comic, which led to my body

         existing with hers

like rain that’s found its way underground

to water it naturally joins.

         I can’t remember

ever saying the exact word, tenderness,

though she did.  It’s a word I see now

         you must be older to use,

you must have experienced the absence of it

often enough to know what silk and deep balm

         it is

when at last it comes.  I think it was terror

at first that drove me to touch her

         so softly,

then selfishness, the clear benefit

of doing something that would come back

         to me twofold,

and finally, sometime later, it became

reflexive and motionless in the high

         ignorance of love.

Oh abstractions are abstract

until they have an ache in them.  I met

         a woman never touched

gently, and when I ended between us

I had new hands and new sorrow,

         everything it meant

to be a man changed, unheroic, floating.

                                                                               Stephen Dunn- American