Gerald Stern

He was cleaning leaves for one at a time was what he needed and a minute before the two brown poodles walked by he looked at the stripped-down trees from one more point of view and thought they were part of a system in which the dappled was foreign for he had arrived at his own conclusion and that was for him a relief even if he was separated, even if  his hands were frozen, even if the wind knocked him down, even if his cat went into her helpless mode inside the green and sheltering Japanese yew tree.

Every city in America is approached through a work of art, usually a bridge but sometimes a road that curves underneath or drops down from the sky. Pittsburgh has a tunnel— you don’t know it—that takes you through the rivers and under the burning hills. I went there to cry in the woods or carry my heavy bicycle through fire and flood. Some have little parks— San Francisco has a park. Albuquerque is beautiful from a distance; it is purple at five in the evening. New York is Egyptian, especially from the little rise on the hill at 14-C; it has twelve entrances like the body of Jesus, and Easton, where I lived, has two small floating bridges in front of it that brought me in and out. I said good-bye to them both when I was 57. I’m reading Joseph Wood Krutch again—the second time. I love how he lived in the desert. I’m looking at the skull of Georgia O’Keeffe. I’m kissing Stieglitz good-bye. He was a city, Stieglitz was truly a city in every sense of the word; he wore a library across his chest; he had a church on his knees. I’m kissing him good-bye; he was, for me, the last true city; after him there were only overpasses and shopping centers, little enclaves here and there, a skyscraper with nothing near it, maybe a meaningless turf where whores couldn’t even walk, where nobody sits, where nobody either lies or runs; either that or some pure desert: a lizard under a boojum, a flower sucking the water out of a rock. What is the life of sadness worth, the bookstores lost, the drugstores buried, a man with a stick turning the bricks up, numbering the shards, dream twenty-one, dream twenty-two. I left with a glass of tears, a little artistic vial. I put it in my leather pockets next to my flask of Scotch, my golden knife and my keys, my joyful poems and my T-shirts. Stieglitz is there beside his famous number; there is smoke and fire above his head; some bowlegged painter is whispering in his ear; some lady-in-waiting is taking down his words. I’m kissing Stieglitz good-bye, my arms are wrapped around him, his photos are making me cry; we’re walking down Fifth Avenue; we’re looking for a pencil; there is a girl standing against the wall—I’m shaking now when I think of her; there are two buildings, one is in blackness, there is a dying poplar; there is a light on the meadow; there is a man on a sagging porch. I would have believed in everything.

How dumb he was to wipe the blood from his eye where he was sucker-punched and stagger out onto the Plaza blind. He had been waiting all night for the acorn moon and eating pineapple topping over his ice cream and arguing either physics or philosophy. He thinks, at this late date, it was the cave again throwing a shadow, although it may have been only some way of reconciling the two oblivious worlds, which was his mission anyhow— if only there was a second moon. He had a kind of beard and though he could practically lift the front end of a car and was already reading Blake, he had never yet tasted honey.

After fighting with his dead brothers and his dead sisters he chose to paint the dead rooster of his youth, thinking God wouldn’t mind a rooster, would he?—or thinking a rooster would look good in a green armchair with flecks of blood on his breast and thighs, his wings resting a little, their delicate bones exposed, a few of the plumes in blue against the yellow naked body, all of those feathers plucked as if by a learned butcher, and yet the head hanging down, the comb disgraced, the mouth open as if for screaming, the right front chair leg, seen from a certain angle, either a weapon or a strong right arm, a screaming arm, the arm of an agitator; and yet at the same time the chair as debonair as any, the brown mahogany polished, the carving nineteenth century, the velvet green, an old velour, as if to match the plumes a little, a blue with a green. No rabbi was present, this he knew, and no dead butcher had ever been there with his burnished knife and his bucket of sand; this was the angry rooster that strutted from one small house to another, that scratched among the rhubarb, he is the one who stopped as if he were thinking, he is upside down now and plucked. It looks as if his eye can hardly contain that much of sorrow, as if it wanted to disappear, and it looks as if his legs were almost helpless, and though his body was huge compared to the armchair, it was only more horrible that way, and though his wings were lifted it wasn’t for soaring, it was more for bedragglement and degradation. Whatever else there was of memory there had to be revenge in there, even revenge on himself, for he had to be the rooster, though that was easy, he was the armchair too, and he was the butcher, it was a way to understand, there couldn’t be another, he had to paint like that, he has to scrape the skin and put the blotches on, and though it was grotesque to put a dead rooster in an armchair his table could have been full, or he just liked the arrangement, or he was good at painting a chair and it was done first—although I doubt it—or someone brought him the bird—a kind of gift—for food was cheap then, and roosters were easy to cook; but it was more than anything else a kind of Tartar, a kind of Jew, he was painting, something that moved from Asia to Europe, something furious, ill and dreamy, something that stood in the mud beside a large wooden building and stared at a cloud, it was so deep in thought, and it had tears in a way, there was no getting around that kind of thinking even if he stood in the middle of the room holding his paintbrush like a thumb at arm’s length closing one of his eyes he still was standing in the mud shrieking, he still was dying for corn, he still was golden underneath his feathers with freckles of blood, for he was a ripped-open Jew, and organs all on show, the gizzard, the liver, for he was a bleeding Tartar, and he was a Frenchman dying on the way to Paris and he was tethered to a table, he was slaughtered.

The thing about the dove was how he cried in my pocket and stuck his nose out just enough to breathe some air and get some snow in his eye and he would have snuggled in but I was afraid and brought him into the house so he could shit on the New York Times, still I had to kiss him after a minute, I put my lips to his beak and he knew what he was doing, he stretched his neck and touched me with his open mouth, lifting his wings a little and readjusting his legs, loving his own prettiness, and I just sang from one of my stupid songs from one of my vile decades, the way I do, I have to admit it was something from trains. I knew he’d like that, resting in the coal car, slightly dusted with mountain snow, somewhere near Altoona, the horseshoe curve he knew so well, his own moan matching the train’s, a radio playing the Inkspots, the engineer roaring.

As far as clocks—and it is time to think of them— I have one on my kitchen shelf and it is flat, with a machine-made flair, a perfect machine from 1948, at the latest, and made of shining plastic with the numbers sharp and clear and slightly magnified in that heartbreaking post-war style, the cord too short, though what does it matter, since the mechanism is broken and it sits unplugged alongside a cheap ceramic rooster, his head insanely small and yet his tiny brain alert for he is the one who will crow and not that broken buzzing relic, though time is different now and dawn is different too, you were up all night and it is dark when he crows and you are waiting to see what direction you should face and if you were born in time or was it wasted and what the day looks like and is the rooster loyal.

In beauty-bright and such it was like Blake’s lily and though an angel he looked absurd dragging a lily out of a beauty-bright store wrapped in tissue with a petal drooping, nor was it useless—you who know it know how useful it is—and how he would be dead in a minute if he were to lose it though how do you lose a lily?His lily was white and he had a foolish smile there holding it up like a candelabrum in his right hand facing the mirror in the hall nor had the endless centuries started yet nor was there one thorn between his small house and the beauty-bright store.

At the confluence of tea roses and Russian sage we made a right at the curved iron fence, one of my dead friends beside me explaining how trees communicated but I couldn’t understand a thing because it was all blurry — the way it gets — and though I knew him well I couldn’t say for sure now whether it was Larry or Phil or Galway or Charlie until I realized it was me talking in some kind of Hebrish they spoke in my town by the Delaware and it was used for code the way one of the Amerindian languages was used in World War II the Germans couldn’t in a million years break since they weren’t as pragmatic irrational and in-your-face as the English and Americans were. I noticed the bees were digging in for a late lunch of what for them was boiled beef and horseradish or maybe it was just for me and they were bent over guzzling madly while paying no attention to the two of us or in any way tired of the nectars since it ran the whole gamut from oysters to soup to — well — boiled beef to strawberry-rhubarb pie and a little whisky after, some of it spilled on the vanilla ice cream that underlaid the pie it had once overlaid, all of this depending on the blossoms they circled over and bent down upon, a cafeteria as good as the one on Broadway called Stanley’s I circled and bent over expending nickels dimes and quarters when the Dulles brothers ran the country. It was Larry, I’m sure now, and what we talked about was cardboard and we were amazed that in the open spaces beside the hotel on 47th Street there were four or five small cardboard “houses,” both of us remembered, the homeless had claimed to sleep in and provide a safe place for their black plastic garbage bags, the size of a room at the Sloane House on 34th Street near the Pennsylvania Station where I put up the price of a meal then for a clean pillowcase with little or no stuffing and a cardboard bed as stiff as metal and a cardboard breakfast of cardboard bread and eggs and between us we talked cardboard, shirts from the cleaners with sheets of cardboard we drew on, cardboard soles in ruined shoes we both wore when we were children, cardboard hats, cardboard to lie on listening to outdoor concerts and cardboard masks we made with scissors and crayon for costume dances, balls is what we called them as if we were art students in Paris about to swim in the nearest fountain. Though what I want to say is the bees were too busy to do us any harm and it was packs of wild dogs, not swarms of bees, that terrified me (Larry, too) except for one occasion when I pushed the wrong end of an old broom into a hive of yellow jackets on the underside of a low-lying garage roof and an angry swarm chased me through the yard and over a fence hating any form of criminal intrusion, urban renewal, or gentrification, I who couldn’t resist intrusions, who never could, omnivorous as I was, living on apples and bananas as well as baby lamb chops, who ran like hell that day (Larry, too) for we in our separate ways didn’t want to be paralyzed then eaten by larvae, none of us dead ones did.

In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots I have never seen a postwar Philco with the automatic eye nor heard Ravel's "Bolero" the way I did in 1945 in that tiny living room on Beechwood Boulevard, nor danced as I did then, my knives all flashing, my hair all streaming, my mother red with laughter, my father cupping his left hand under his armpit, doing the dance of old Ukraine, the sound of his skin half drum, half fart, the world at last a meadow, the three of us whirling and singing, the three of us screaming and falling, as if we were dying, as if we could never stop—in 1945 — in Pittsburgh, beautiful filthy Pittsburgh, home of the evil Mellons, 5,000 miles away from the other dancing—in Poland and Germany— oh God of mercy, oh wild God.

I was waiting to try out one of my inventions from the flattop garage roof — parachutes this time — when I tasted a black cherry from the next yard, wondering even at that age who had prior rights and what was constitutional so instead of  jumping I wrote a brief brief called Yaakov vs. the Tree Trunk where everyone laughed herself crazy at Marlboro vs. Madison or Red Stain vs. the State of New Jersey so bless me you fools for aren’t you mortals? And don’t you bend your body down over the water to taste the ice? And who, in your family, even ever just thought of swallowing a goldfish from the bowl, say, picking up its slippery body, bending your neck back and gulping it down even before they entered law school?