Patrick Dundon’s “Gratitude” says this:

[…] Sure my mother did not hold me enough,
too tempted by the specter of satiety only alcohol can bring.

It’s a piece of important nonsense; a specter is terrifying, not tempting. And who has ever been “sated” by alcohol? This kind of statement is how a poem makes a play at being interesting. It lays down a dare: Figure that out.

The poem says it woke from a dream of a terrible storm to the sounds of a terrible storm. Then this:

[…] No one was there
to hold me, and I was happy. A little curtain of satisfaction
fell over my face while I lay there, wanting nothing.

“I was happy”! The poem got more interesting in a bracing zag away from the predictable. Didn’t you expect a pity party here?

The poem says “Jonathan asks me to send him a poem about gratitude.” 

At first, nothing comes to mind. All poems, I think,
are about lack: language’s inability to capture the real.

Meta-talk, meat for thought; a theory-adjacent enunciation setting up a narrative whose conclusion I really like. The poet sends Jonathan a poem about contentment instead. (“To thank takes work. You must risk foolishness to do it.”)

[…] Jonathan thanked me
for the poem. We both knew it was not what he wanted.

The poem concludes with a mini-explication of the poem that Jonathan received:

In the end, the speaker sees birds rising up
from gnarled trees and thinks, as they fly off,
I need to go there too. When really, the birds
should exist without the complication of need.
I tell Jonathan I will find a new poem, one
without desire, or, better yet, without birds at all.

That ending lifts me up, suggesting what I dimly perceive: that the purest expression of oneself distills one’s self away. Want nothing. See past depicting what you think you represent. Past the birds.

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