Stern - Save the last dance: poems

POEMS
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
New York * London Copyright 2008 by Gerald Stern All rights reserved For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stern, Gerald, date.
Save the last dance: poems / Gerald Stern.1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-0-393-06998-3
I.

Title.
PS3569.T3888S28 2008
811.54dc22 2007052327 W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com W. W.

Traveling backwards in time is almost nothing for here is the brain and with it I have relived one thing after another but I am wavering at only reliving though what is hard is being there I dont know what the Germans called it, existing, non-existing, both at once, there is a rose explaining it, or its a table; imagine that, from one tree and its branches once it was rooted, once the leaves were glabrous and coruscating, then came everything.

This was to be free of the burden of representation, to put your feet in an X-ray machine and thereby not only get cancer and not only get fitted up with the perfect pair of shoes, but thence to grieve how thin your bones looked, how like more like a bird you were than an ape and how you mourned how huge your feet were and you went to the machine oh every ten minutes or so and how that leather pinched for it was more cardboard than cow and how it was inevitable the limping, it was called the breaking in, I wanted to tell you this.

I was the one who lived in that room and it was Liz we lured there though we tossed a coin first and I was in a dead sleep when the two of them arrived in the morning one of them disheveled and one of them pert who after he left we lay like cardboard in the narrow bed I bought the stockings for and took her home on the subway or where she worked maybe and after my classes I climbed six floors again to sit and stare from my small desk in front of the portholes and wander off from time to time to the sink in the hall nor was there a rug or a lamp and it was the year they turned the lights on and my Bible was stolen.

I get the sense that she is not cooperative in English and on the last leg of her trip into New York City going through the tunnel and briefly through the light and into another tunnel but this time for good she sits until the line is in front of her, singing a little Christmas chanty, her nose running but otherwise decent, the smile extreme but not forced, the coffee stains nothing, the ugly lying tabloid under her feet, whatever the language is, also nothing, and I, eternal sucker, I rub my eyes for I belong to a certain breed of men who when the train jerks then slows down on the platform it is a drama extreme, and there was a time I wouldnt have lost her, and also a time I followed someone, I say it with shame and mortification, for half a day because I couldnt bear it, I would have lost everything, I hung on to a thread.

I get the sense that she is not cooperative in English and on the last leg of her trip into New York City going through the tunnel and briefly through the light and into another tunnel but this time for good she sits until the line is in front of her, singing a little Christmas chanty, her nose running but otherwise decent, the smile extreme but not forced, the coffee stains nothing, the ugly lying tabloid under her feet, whatever the language is, also nothing, and I, eternal sucker, I rub my eyes for I belong to a certain breed of men who when the train jerks then slows down on the platform it is a drama extreme, and there was a time I wouldnt have lost her, and also a time I followed someone, I say it with shame and mortification, for half a day because I couldnt bear it, I would have lost everything, I hung on to a thread.

How was it different with Dante? Though I ended lostand entangledhowever he ended.

1946 there was an overcoat with rows of buttons fifteen dollars and two American flags for some ungodly reason and a slight rise in the distance as the street went over the river for which I would have breathed the air both in and out since I was a bellows and one by one my lungs were ruined but I wouldnt change my life, what for? You wouldnt know unless you crossed the river yourself, unless you climbed a hill and turned around twice to stare at the street behind you, either mud or cobblestone, and count the wooden steps or look through the windows longingly, the houses piled up the one below the next, the dirt supreme, your breathing heavy, the base of a cliff even further below, a river shining from time to time, your mind half-empty, your teacher a curbstone, the mountain really hill upon hill; you know the details, the porches pulled you up, your face turned white at a certain point, Im sure you walked through a cloud how slow you learned, how
absurd the goats of Arcady or the baskets of apples in New Jerusalem compared to that.

From where I sit, given the time of year, the light comes only between the trees, but there is water, and at four in the evening, given our latitude and the direction we face, the sun lights up what seems, from where I sit, more like a pool and I am changed for a minute, though it is a river, you can depend on that, I crossed from time to time and lived on for a while and was assured that way the hundreds of nights I walked my mile and ended up at the hot waterfall and the gears of the nineteenth century above the high brick wall I rested under.

The whole point was getting rid of glut for which I starved myself and lived with the heat down and only shaved oh every five days and used a blunt razor for months so that my cheek was not only red but the hair was bent not cut for which I then would be ready for the bicycle and the broken wrist, for whichoh GodI would be ready to climb the steps and fight the boxes with only nothing, a pair of shoes, and once inside to open the window and let the snow in and when the fire was over climb down the icy fire escape and drop the last twenty feet with notebooks against my chest, bruises down one side of my body, fresh blood down the other.

How love of every single human creature took place in my life and how it lasted for almost a week but I had a fever; and the day I realized finally I had to give up running for I had lost the will, almost the muscles themselves, I was confused since I was never a runner as an adult, and on the last day I was taking my antibiotics I lost a small pink pill while in between reading the labels, or I convinced myself that that was the case and it took me almost an hour to stop my coughing I was in such a state, and I was light-headed walking over the bricks and had to hold on to my wooden fence, amazed that we could last the way we do compared to birds just blown by the wind, their locomotion beyond themselves, or ants and beetles, God, what does the mind do there, or bronze roosters?