Gerald Stern

I wanted to know what it was like before we had voices and before we had bare fingers and before we had minds to move us through our actions and tears to help us over our feelings, so I drove my daughter through the snow to meet her friend and filled her car with suitcases and hugged her as an animal would, pressing my forehead against her, walking in circles, moaning, touching her cheek, and turned my head after them as an animal would, watching helplessly as they drove over the ruts, her smiling face and her small hand just visible over the giant pillows and coat hangers as they made their turn into the empty highway.

It is my emotions that early me through Lambertville, New Jersey, sheer feeling—and an obscure detour—that brings me to a coffee shop called “This Is It” and a small New Jersey clapboard with a charming fake sign announcing it to be the first condemned building in the United States and an old obese collie sitting on the cement steps of the front porch begging forgiveness with his red eyes. I talk to the coughing lady for five minutes, admire her sign, her antique flag, her dog, and share her grief over the loss of the house next door, boarded up forever, tied up in estates, surrounded by grass, doomed to an early fire. Everyone is into my myth! The whole countryside is studying weeds, collecting sadness, dreaming of odd connections and no place more than Lambertville will do for ghosts to go through your body or people to live out their lives with a blurred vision. The old woman is still talking. She tells me about her youth, she tells me about her mother’s ganglia and how the doctor slammed a heavy Bible down on her watery wrist, scattering spoons and bread crumbs and turning over little tin containers of alyssum and snapdragon. She tells me about the curved green glass that is gone forever. She tells me about her dog and its monotonous existence. Ah, but for sadness there are very few towns like Lambertville. It drips with grief, it almost sags from the weight. I know Frackville, Pa., and Sandusky, Ohio, and I know coal chutes, empty stores and rusty rivers but Lambertville is special, it is a wooden stage set, a dream-ridden carcass where people live out serious lives with other people’s secrets, trying to touch with their hands and eat with their cold forks, and open houses with their keys; and sometimes, on a damp Sunday, they leave the papers on the front porch to walk down York Street or Buttonwood Street past abandoned factories and wooden garages, past the cannon with balls and the new band shell, past the downtown churches and the antique shops, and even across the metal plates on the Delaware River to stinking New Hope, where all their deep longing is reduced to an hour and a half of greedy buying. I crawl across the street to have my coffee at the low counter, to listen to the noise of the saws drifting through the open window and to study the strange spirit of this tar paper café stuck on a residential street three or four blocks from Main and Bridge where except for the sudden windfall of the looping detour it would be relegated forever to the quiet company of three or four close friends and the unexpected attention of a bored crossing guard or exhausted meter man or truck driver. I listen to the plans of the three teen-age businessmen about to make their fortune in this rotting shack and walk—periodically—past the stainless steel sink to take my piss in the misplaced men’s room. I watch the bright happy girls organize their futures over and around the silent muscular boys and I wait, like a peaceful man, hours on end, for the truck out back to start, for the collie to die, for the flies to come, for the summer to bring its reckoning.

Across a space peopled with stars I am laughing while my sides ache for existence it turns out is profound though the profound because of time it turns out is an illusion and all of this is infinitely improbable given the space, for which I gratefully lie in three feet of snow making a shallow grave I would have called an angel otherwise and think of my own rapturous escape from living only as dust and dirt, little sister.

Bing Crosby died in Spain while playing golf with Franco but who could care less, and at this writing only a few of my dear ones are gone—ah I could make a sad list—the swifts, as if to prove a point, fly into the light and make a mockery out of our darkness. They scream for food but in the world of shadows they only make a quick motion; I have studied them—the whiter the wall is—the barer the bulb— the more they scream, the more they dip down. I have made my two hands into a shape and I have darkened the wall to see what it looks like—I have shortened my two broken fingers to make the small tail and twisted the knuckles sideways so when they come in to eat one shadow overtakes the other, that way I can live in the darkness with Franco's poisonous head and Crosby's ears, who fainted, a thousand to one, behind a number two club, though no swift died for him, well, for them, digging for clubs. I watch the birds every night; they fly in a great circle, much larger than what I can see, their dipping is what I dreaded in front of my plain white wall—I say it for the nine hundred Americans who died in Spain. I thought I'd have to wait forever to do them a tiny justice and listen to their songs and die a little from the foolhardy mournful words, flying down one air current or another and doing the sides of buildings and tops of trees, the low-lying straggling dogwood, the full-bodied huge red maple, my dear ones.

Me trying to understand say whence say whither, say what, say me with a pencil walking, say reading the dictionary, say learning medieval Latin, reading Spengler, reading Whitehead, William James I loved him, swimming breaststroke and thinking for an hour, how did I get here? Or thinking in line, say the 69 streetcar or 68 or 67 Swissvale, that would take me elsewhere, me with a textbook reading the pre-Socratics, so badly written, whoever the author was, me on the floor of the lighted stacks sitting cross-legged, walking afterwards through the park or sometimes running across the bridges and up the hills, sitting down in our tiny diningroom, burning in a certain way, still burning.

For sleeplessness, your head face down, your shoulder blades floating and aspirin as a last resort, when death is threatening, though lately I have experimented with numbers and as for dreams I've never been boring and only once did I bite the arm of a woman sitting next to me and I should be careful, she might have a hand-written poem or a memoir and didn't I bite her arm and aren't we both poets, though I warn her that I make gurgling noises and twitch in both legs and make the bed jump and I am exhausted from looking at poems and I don't care about her nuts and bolts and she has to go to the wilderness herself and fuck the exercises, let her get smashed by a Mack truck, then she'll be ready to mourn.

Sometimes I sit in my blue chair trying to remember what it was like in the spring of 1950 before the burning coal entered my life. I study my red hand under the faucet, the left one below the grease line consisting of four feminine angels and one crooked broken masculine one and the right one lying on top of the white porcelain with skin wrinkled up like a chicken's beside the razor and the silver tap. I didn't live in Paris for nothing and walk with Jack Gilbert down the wide sidewalks thinking of Hart Crane and Apollinaire and I didn't save the picture of the two of us moving through a crowd of stiff Frenchmen and put it beside the one of Pound and Williams unless I wanted to see what coals had done to their lives too. I say it with vast affection, wanting desperately to know what the two of them talked about when they lived in Pennsylvania and what they talked about at St. Elizabeth's fifty years later, looking into the sun, 40,000 wrinkles between them, the suffering finally taking over their lives. I think of Gilbert all the time now, what we said on our long walks in Pittsburgh, how lucky we were to live in New York, how strange his great fame was and my obscurity, how we now carry the future with us, knowing every small vein and every elaboration. The coal has taken over, the red coal is burning between us and we are at its mercy— as if a power is finally dominating the two of us; as if we're huddled up watching the black smoke and the ashes; as if knowledge is what we needed and now we have that knowledge. Now we have that knowledge. The tears are different—though I hate to speak for him—the tears are what we bring back to the darkness, what we are left with after our own escape, what, all along, the red coal had in store for us as we moved softly, either whistling or singing, either listening or reasoning, on the gray sidewalks and the green ocean; in the cars and the kitchens and the bookstores; in the crowded restaurants, in the empty woods and libraries.

Having outlived Allen I am the one who has to suffer New York all by myself and eat my soup alone in Poland although sometimes I sit with Linda he met in Berkeley or San Francisco when he met Jack, the bread just coarse enough, the noodles soft but not thin and wasted, and not too salty the way the Chinese further down sometimes make them, the name still on my mind whatever the reason for mystery, or avoidance, though rat Netanyahu and pig that swings from a needle or lives in some huge incubator, they do darkness where there was light, the name hates them, the name in hiding, the name with a beard, and Linda she loves the name though she invokes her Christ as Jack her lover and tormentor did and taught her to do though it is too easy, that, it troubles me but what can I say, what should I say while we walk north on the right hand side, past the pork store and the hardware store, me lecturing on Logos (my God) and what not Hebrews and Greeks where Allen and I once kissed, Jack in the sun now.

Much better than a goat it was to drop an anarchist from a Park Row window because he wouldn’t confess to federal agents. He fell to his death while sitting on the windowsill holding a pamphlet close to his eyes and maybe waving his arm in appreciation, and no one heard him screaming — they were wearing earmuffs or just they forgot to bring their earpieces but it was nothing, he was a fiend and a cutthroat and he would have murdered Rockefeller if he had the chance, for which reason I have locked my front door for I can’t find a rat trap big enough.

Nothing by or for itself, the sound of eggs hard-boiling in the hot water echoed by the heavy rain that pours down the broken spout, the cowardly lion’s roar answered by the moos of the buffalo the bloody mouth of the one by the sharp and polished horns of the other, even Nelson Eddy could hear someone else singing in his bathtub the songs from his dumb movies though when I once drove up the vertical highway in Colorado to visit Elaine the Gnostic and take her to the stone mountain where her husband fell we drove back without talking though she touched my knee in gratitude and when we reached the very top there were no trees only flowers grew there accompanied by nothing the name of which was loneliness which Shelley the poet himself suffered from among his beleaguered women you’ll die remembering.