Bourgeois, By Stephen Dunn

What we would never let ourselves become, tra la. Especially a petit. Wasn’t the edge the only place to be? Or of the working class, which would rise someday. Startling that it rose, without rancor, happily in fact, toward the bourgeoisie. Startling, too: capitalism’s elasticity, that fat boy with quick feet, subtly accommodating, and not quite there when we swung. In a few long years we’d be his wary friend. We’d own mutual funds. Our property was our property, and fences were good. Parents now, we offered “Be carefuls” as often as we once cried, “Fascist pigs.” Oh not petit, but grand! So what if we still believed in the efficacies of art, and still spoke about souls? So what if we resisted the God-fearing and the Republicans and a few of their little, dispiriting rules? Each year we felt less and less dislocated at the mall. We used our remotes without irony and for entire evenings hardly moved.

From “Riffs & Reciprocities: Prose Pairs” by Stephen Dunn (W. W. Norton: 112 pp., $19.95)