Last Blue Poems

by Stern, Gerald

• ISBN13: 9780393321623
• ISBN10: 0393321622
• Edition: 00
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-06-17
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Summary

"Stern's bebop poems shimmer and shadow-dance down the page."-Booklist

Author Biography

Gerald Stern won the 1998 National Book Award for Poetry for This Time: New and Selected Poems. He lives in Lambertville, New Jersey

Table of Contents

One of the Smallest	p. 13
Pluma	p. 19
Pamet Harbor	p. 20
Against the Crusades	p. 21
Ravages	p. 23
Whatever Paris Meant	p. 24
Someone to Watch Over Me	p. 26
Wailing	p. 27
An Explanation	p. 30
Which One?	p. 32
A Separate Logic	p. 33
Visiting My Own House in Iowa City	p. 35
Domestic	p. 37
Big Annie Rooney	p. 38
Scratch	p. 39
Light	p. 43
The Sorrows	p. 45
Progress and Poverty	p. 48
His Cup	p. 51
Dirty Hands	p. 57
Greek Neighbor Home from the Hospital	p. 58
Pennsylvania Bio	p. 60
Massachusetts Song	p. 62
Old Scarf	p. 63
A Rose Between the Sheets	p. 65
Swifts	p. 66
Street of the Butchers	p. 68
About Women	p. 69
Last Home	p. 71
Forsythia	p. 72
Lavender	p. 73
Larry Levis Visits Easton, Pa. During a November Freeze	p. 74
Short Words	p. 79
The Music	p. 81
Night	p. 83
Drowning on the Pamet River	p. 84
Art	p. 85
Mexican	p. 87
Paris	p. 89
Already April	p. 90
March 27	p. 91
The Dove's Neck	p. 92
Sleep	p. 94
August 20-21	p. 95
This Life	p. 97
First Gardenia	p. 98
The Joke	p. 99
Snowdrop	p. 101
December 98	p. 102
Last Blue	p. 105
Vision and What It Was	p. 108
Kingdom	p. 110
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Chapter One

    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 ash tray, one of them

nothing but carbon, one of them

wood part way, 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 linger 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 euchered 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 some place 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.

    PAMET HARBOR

Going west to east on the Pamet River I sang

in the wet grasses though I was hardly dismembered

and as far as I could tell neither Christ nor Apollo

was shutting poets up. In fact, I played

my favorite tape while Haba was pulling weeds

out of the motor: "A Kiss to Build a Dream On,"

and "Sweet Lorraine" and "Makin' Whoopee," the voice

the one we adored, that wise throatiness--

Apollo couldn't do that--nor the eyeballs

nor the thick lips, the light so brilliant it shone

on all of us, we had to look at the sky;

and the wrinkled smile--Apollo just couldn't do that

with wings alone (though Christ could!) makin' whoopee.

    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 Rosie Rosewall 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.

    RAVAGES

I hold my right hand up so the Greek will stop

talking for a minute; I am recording

everything with my left and my wrist is hurting

as it always does. His harsh language

is a combination of anger and humor, one

supporting the other, and his body, stiff

and out of control, is just an extension of

his scattered words. His wife went to the Poconos

to be with their oldest daughter for a while

and he is rebuffed and lonely so he talks

to a dove and reads his paper. He it was who

cursed the Colonels and he it was who slept

in a cave in 1942 and fought

the Germans with a hunting rifle, he tied

a knife blade to the bore, and suffered indignities

selling hot dogs in Easton, Pennsylvania,

for twenty years and he deserves some love.

He lifts himself with a twirling motion and when he

reaches into my yard to steal a tea rose

I tell him--in English--how the leg has to breathe;

and how the forehead absorbs the sun. I kick

my watering can so he kicks his and we slam

our kitchen doors together though his was a second

after mine, or mine after his, so one of us

is left alone and one turns on his light

before the other does and starts his tea

a second sooner or closes his bedroom window

before the other or studies his ravages.

Copyright © 2000 Gerald Stern. All rights reserved.