The Residue of Art

By Nat Kuhn                    For Art Nahill

What I remember from Art is
not the management of congestive
heart failure or triple antibiotic
coverage or even
his own poetry
though I do remember
being impressed
The maxim I retained was: if you do
want someone to remember your own
poetry, do not read a poem
by Stephen Dunn
alongside it

But the real lesson
that was lurking, coming to
words only twenty years later
writing this poem is:
if you want to give someone
something that endures
for twenty years,
do.

Nat Kuhn is a psychiatrist and psychotherapist in the Boston area.  Before that he was a mathematician, so he has some familiarity with the unexpected.  But when a poem comes to him, it's unexpected even to him.