Blessed as We Were Read online

  Blessed

  as We

  Were

  Late Selected and

  New Poems, 2000–2018

  Gerald

  Stern

  W.W.NORTON & COMPANY

  Independent Publisher Since 1923

  For Anne Marie, whether in snow or sun. Always.

  Contents

  from Last Blue (2000)

  One of the Smallest

  Pluma

  Against the Crusades

  Someone to Watch Over Me

  Wailing

  His Cup

  Greek Neighbor Home from the Hospital

  Pennsylvania Bio

  Massachusetts Song

  A Rose Between the Sheets

  Street of the Butchers

  Last Home

  Larry Levis Visits Easton, PA, During a November Freeze

  Short Words

  Night

  Drowning on the Pamet River

  Mexican

  Paris

  Already April

  March 27

  August 20–21

  This Life

  Snowdrop

  Last Blue

  Kingdom

  from American Sonnets (2002)

  Winter Thirst

  June

  Aberdeen Proving Grounds, 1946

  For the Bee

  Alone

  September, 1999

  You

  The Ink Spots

  Exordium and Terminus

  In Time

  Les Neiges d’Antan

  Hydrangea

  Spider

  Iris

  Grand Hotel

  Sam and Morris

  Burning

  Studebaker

  Cost

  Still Burning

  Roses

  Hearts

  Slash of Red

  Box of Cigars

  Justice

  American Heaven

  from Everything Is Burning (2005)

  La Pergola

  E.P. 1

  Albatross 1

  Never Went to Birdland

  The Snow on the River

  Sylvia

  Hemingway’s House

  May 30

  May Frick Be Damned

  The Trent Lott, the McNamara Blues

  The Tie

  Boléro

  Stern Country

  Gimbel’s

  Lilies

  Loyal Carp

  Golden Rule

  L’Chaim

  Cigars

  Shouldering

  Bejewels

  Bio

  Battle of the Bulge

  Mars

  Driven

  Shepherd

  Homesick

  The Law

  She Was a Dove

  from Save the Last Dance (2008)

  Diogenes

  Traveling Backwards

  What For?

  Bronze Roosters

  Blue Like That

  59 N. Sitgreaves

  Spaghetti

  Love

  Before Eating

  Asphodel

  What Then?

  One Poet

  Wordsworth

  Lorca

  Death by Wind

  Rose in Your Teeth

  Save the Last Dance for Me

  from In Beauty Bright (2012)

  February 22

  Stoop

  Aliens

  Dumb

  Gracehoper

  Sugar

  Sinai

  Domestic

  Frogs

  In Beauty Bright

  Journey

  Died in the Mills

  Rosenblatt

  Iberia

  Independence Day

  The Name

  Broken Glass

  Soll Ihr Gornisht Helfen

  Voltage

  For D.

  Rage

  Love

  Nostalgia

  Sleeping with Birds

  My Libby

  86th Birthday at MacDowell

  Plaster Pig

  Apt. 5 FW I

  Counting

  Day of Grief

  Droit de Faim

  1946

  Bio III

  from Divine Nothingness (2015)

  Bio IV

  Ruth

  Dolly

  D.

  Limping

  Love

  Top of a Mountain

  Hell

  Mule

  Wilderness

  Not Me

  After Ritsos

  After the Church Reading Against the War

  112th Street (1980)

  Free Lunch

  Maryanne

  What Brings Me Here?

  Durante

  The World We Should Have Stayed In

  Divine Nothingness

  He Who Is Filthy

  Lifewatch

  from Galaxy Love (2017)

  Bio VIII

  Hiphole

  Blue Particles

  Ghost

  Ich Bin Jude

  Azaleas

  Perish the Day

  Poverty

  Bess, Zickel, Warhol, Arendt

  Merwin

  Route 29

  Two Boats

  Silence

  A Walk Back from the Restaurant

  The Year of Everything

  Two Things

  Larry

  Sunset

  Orson

  Gelato

  Ancient Chinese Egg

  Loneliness

  Hamlet Naked

  Fall 1960

  Skylark

  The Other

  New Poems

  The Camargue

  Red and Swollen

  Baby Rat

  The Cost of Love

  Hearts Amiss

  Hebrish

  Cherries

  No Kissing There

  Lake Country

  Wet Peach

  March 17th

  No House

  Mount Hope Cemetery

  Red Jungle Fowl

  Knucklebones

  Frutta da Looma

  Adonis

  Tony Was Right

  Blessed as We Were

  The Beautiful

  Torn Coat

  From Wackadoodle

  Forfor

  Elder Blues

  Under Your Wing

  Punching Holes

  Never

  The Late Celan

  Warbler

  At the Memorial of Al Dazzo, 1939–2017

  Acknowledgments

  Index of Titles and First Lines

  from Last Blue

  One of the Smallest

  Made of the first gray light

  that came into my room,

  made of the hole itself

  in the cracked window blind,

  thus made of sunshine, thus made of

  gas and water, one of the

  smallest, smallest, made of

  that which seizes the eye,

  that which an eagle needs

  and even a mole, a mole, a

  rabbit, a quail, a lilac,

  it was uncreated. I

  fought for it, I tore down

  walls, I cut my trees,

  I lay on my back, I had a

  rock to support my head, I

  swam in two directions,

  I lay down smiling, the sun

  made my eyes water, what

  the wind and the dirt took away

  and what was abraded and what was

  exhausted, exhausted, was only

  a just reflection. The sun

  slowly died and I much

  quicker, much quicker, I raced

 
; until I was wrinkled but I was

  lost as the star was and I

  was losing light, I was dying

  before I was born, thus I was

  blue at the start, though I was

  red much later, much later,

  for I was a copy, but I was

  something exploding and I was

  born for just that but fought

  against it, against it. The light

  of morning was gray with a green

  and that of evening was almost a

  rose in one sky though it was

  white in another—at least

  in one place the light comes back—

  and I disappeared like a fragment

  of gas you’d call it, or fire,

  fragment by fragment I think,

  cooled down and changed into metal,

  captured and packaged as it will be

  in one or two more centuries

  and turned then into a bell—

  not a bridge, not a hammer—

  really the tongue of a bell,

  if bells will still be in use then,

  and I will sing as a bell does,

  you’d call it tolling—such

  was my burst of light seen from

  a certain viewpoint though seen from

  another, another, no sudden

  flash but a long slow burning

  as in the olive tree burning,

  as in the carob, as slow as the

  olive, still giving up chocolate

  after two thousand years, that’s

  what we lacked, our light

  was like the comet’s, like a

  flash of fosfur, a burst

  from a Spanish matchbox, the wood

  broken in two, the flame

  lasting six seconds—I counted—

  that is, when the fosfur worked,

  two or three lives lived out

  in a metal ashtray, one of them

  nothing but carbon, one of them

  wood partway, poor thing that

  died betimes, one snuffed out

  just at the neck where the pinkish

  head was twisted the wrong way

  and one of them curling up

  even after burning, thus the

  light I loved stacked in a box

  depending on two rough sides

  and on the wind and on the

  gentleness of my hand,

  the index finger pressed

  against the wood, the flash

  of fire always a shock,

  always new and enlightening,

  the same explosion forever—

  I call it forever—forever—

  sitting with my mouth open

  in some unbearable blue,

  bridal wreath in my right hand,

  since this is the season, my left hand

  scratching and scratching, the sun

  in front now. How did dogwood

  get into this yard? How did

  the iris manage to get here?

  And grow that way? I live

  without a beard, I’m streaked

  with a kind of purple, my hands

  are folded and overlapping, I

  love the rain, I am

  a type of Persian, where I am

  and in this season I blossom

  for fifteen hours a day, I

  walk through streams of some sort—

  I like that thinking—corpuscles

  bombard my eyes—I call it

  light—it was what gave me

  life in the first place—no no

  shame in wandering, no shame

  in adoring—what it what it

  was was so primitive

  we had to disturb it—call it

  disturbing, call it interfering—

  at five in the morning in front of

  the dumpster, at six looking down

  on the river, a little tired from

  the two hundred steps, my iris

  in bloom down there, my maples

  blowing a little, I was

  a mole and a rabbit, I was

  a stone at first, I turned

  garish for a while and burned.

  Pluma

  Once, when there were no riches, somewhere in southern

  Mexico I lost my only pen in the

  middle of one of my dark and flashy moments

  and euchred the desk clerk of my small hotel

  out of his only piece of bright equipment

  in an extravagance of double-dealing,

  nor can I explain the joy in that and how I

  wrote for my life, though unacknowledged, and clearly

  it was unimportant and I had the money and

  all I had to do was look up the Spanish and

  I was not for a second constrained and there was

  no glory, not for a second, it had nothing to

  do with the price of the room, for example, it only

  made writing what it should be and the life we

  led more rare than what we thought and tested

  the art of giving back, and someplace near me,

  as if there had to be a celebration

  to balance out the act of chicanery,

  a dog had started to bark and lights were burning.

  Against the Crusades

  Don’t think that being a left-handed nightingale was all legerdemain

  or that I am that small angry bastard who hates whores,

  only I disguised it by laughing; or that it’s

  easy leaving a restaurant by yourself and holding

  your other hand against the bricks to keep from falling;

  or anybody can play the harp, or anybody knows the words

  to “Blue Sunday” and “After the Ball Was Just Over You Dropped Dead.”

  If you can stand Strauss then so can I,

  oh filthy Danube, oh filthy Delaware, oh filthy Allegheny.

  And anyone who never opened a Murphy bed

  night after night for seven years without ripping

  the sheet and had neither desk nor dresser can’t walk

  in my shoes or wear my crocodile T-shirt.

  And anyone thinking that a Jew being a Jew

  is something you should apologize for as if Richard

  Wagner just stepped into the room wearing a bronze

  headpiece with a pink feather sticking out of it

  is nothing less than a fool himself who buys into

  dead stoves and dead feelings and doesn’t know the

  sweetness of his own lips and the tenderness of his fingers.

  God bless the Jewish comedians who never denigrated Blacks,

  and God bless the good gentiles and God bless Mayor Scully

  and Councilman Wolk and Rosey Rowswell and Eleanor Roosevelt;

  and the chorus of Blue Saints behind Bishop Elder Beck

  and the old theater on Wylie Avenue I visited every Sunday night

  to hear them sing and pray and hear him preach.

  God bless the Lucca Cafe. God bless the green benches

  in Father Demo Square and the dear Italian lady

  carrying a huge bouquet of red and white roses

  in front of her like a candelabra and the tiny white

  baby’s breath that filled the empty spaces with clapping and singing.

  Someone to Watch Over Me

  It is not knowing what a mulberry sidewalk looks like

  in the first place that will start you up sliding, then dancing,

  though if it weren’t for my bird-like interior and how I shake

  one foot then the other I would have not seen the encroachment

  myself; and if it weren’t for the squirrel who lives in pure greed

  and balances whatever he touches with one hand then another

  I would have picked the berries up one berry at a time

  and laid them out to dry beside my crinkled lily and my pink daisy.

  In this d
ecade I am taking care of the things I love. I’m

  sorting everything out starting, if I have to, with the

  smallest blossom, the smallest, say, salmon-colored petunia.

  I’m eating slowly, dipping one crumb at a time in my beer,

  and singing—as I never did before—one word at a time

  in my true voice, which is after all a quiet second tenor

  that came upon me after my first descent into manhood

  and after a disgrace involving my seventh-grade music teacher

  and a sudden growth of hair. If it weren’t for my large lips

  I could have played the French horn. If I didn’t like mulberries—

  one among a million, I know, and eat them—without sugar—

  the way a grackle does his from the downtrodden branches

  I wouldn’t be standing on a broken chair, and I wouldn’t be shaking;

  and if I didn’t slide from place to place and walk

  with a toothbrush in my pocket and touch one bush

  for belief and one for just beauty I wouldn’t be singing.

  Wailing

  Walking from west to east past the living

  dead man on the corner of Grove and Fourth

  north side of the bank I closed my eyes

  so I wouldn’t have to see his stumps and the red

  mouth without a tongue and make the water

  rush through my ears so I wouldn’t have to hear him.

  And sitting on the bench across the street

  I exchanged ideas with the woman next to me

  on a question in ethics, Kant and Schlegel; I made

  a reference to early Herodotus, she stuck by

  Bentham, pleasure and pain, though she was loyal

  also to Hobbes, he of the loathsome universe.

  While the sun, though who would notice it, was covered

  in what the older Plato would call slime

  and the one tree that didn’t have metal growing

  through it shook with life—I’d say it was leaves

  but birds rushed by and one was Bentham and one

  was Hobbes himself, one of the true slime-chasers.

  And sitting across from me although the lice

  drove him crazy was the master of nuance

  lifting a wing and eating, he of the blinking

  eyes we waited for standing alone

  and walking along the slats of his bench, the prince

  of bleeding mouths, I’m sure, and duke of welts,

  not to mention organs erupting and faces

  some black and some red but all with huge creases and I,

  with a scholar like that, I kept him in bread, I gave him

  one Guggenheim after another, even I

  gave him a Hobbes, a half a bagel, with seeds

  from the opium tree and did my drumming, hands

  on the cement armrests, now beginning to clap,

  and a tongue of my own inside my mouth, still thinking,

  still talking, I will learn to forgive, still lucky