Stern - In Beauty Bright

ALSO BY GERALD STERN The Pineys The Naming of Beasts Rejoicings Lucky Life The Red Coal Paradise Poems Lovesick Leaving Another Kingdom Two Long Poems Bread Without Sugar Odd Mercy This Time: New and Selected Poems Last Blue American Sonnets Not God After All Everything Is Burning Save the Last Dance What I Cant Bear Losing: Notes from a Life Early Collected Poems: 19651992 In Beauty Bright GERALD STERN W. W. NORTON & COMPANY New York * London For my friends in Pittsburghduring the dark time. CONTENTS Acknowledgments Poems in this volume have appeared or will appear in the following journals. The Antioch Review: Against Whistling, February 22, Stoop American Poet: Eastside The Cortland Review: Thoreaus Metaphor, Like Fools, I Who Lifted a Car, Gracehoper, Garnish, Sterns Cigars with Sholem Alechim Five Points: Casals, Domestic, Frogs The Georgia Review: For Beautys Sake, Immigrants Great River Review: Broken Pipes, Sugar, Angel, Lupe, Blue Intact, Died in the Mills, Rosenblatt, Angel of Death IWW Journal: Frick Massachusetts Review: Kafeteria, Norman Riding The New Republic: Dumb The New Yorker: The Crossing, Spring, Dream IV, Independence Day, Nietzsche Organica: Yellow Moon, Rapture, The Frick Mansion Poetry: Leaves, The Name, In Beauty Bright, Journey Poetry International: Israel Grossman, Donkey Poets.org: Books Poem-A-Day: Magnolia Smartish Place: 26 Vandam, The Two Pyrenees The Threepenny Review: Eleanor World Literature Today: Sinai, Goat Broken Glass appeared in New Jersey Noir edited by Joyce Carol Oates, published by Akashic Books, 2011 Stoop appeared in Best American Poetry 2010 , edited by Amy Gerstler and David Lehman, published by Scribner Poetry, 2010. Dream IV appeared in Best American Poetry 2011 , edited by Kevin Young and David Lehman, published by Scribner Poetry, 2011.

Casals appeared in Pushcart Prize XXXIV: Best of the Small Presses , edited by Bill Henderson, published by Pushcart Prize Fellowship, 2012. Part I February 22 Reading a Japanese novel during the one day of sunshine following a week of rain, my daughter-in-law going to the post office for the new stamps and on her way home though it was winter and bitter weather was on the way she found a buttercup which meant, she said, the arctic ice cap was melting and it was getting warmer except we couldnt resist it and we walked back through the streaks of ice and the mud for buttercups are varnished, and we adore them, though we mostly live in fear and, for that matter, we crawled back and on the way I smashed the knuckles of my left hand on the blue stone wall for Ronald Reagan and Donald Duck had made it but neither had Scott Nearing or Emma Goldman, talk about nincompoops, talk about birthdays. Against Whistling How we walked for an hour hunting for the right wall and how we kicked our feet at last while singing Summertime, and one of us had a harp and one a black potato and our feet touched the grass which from the bridge above us must have looked heavenly which it was all fall and how we looked like birds perched, as they say, on the wire only there were fewer of us given our size and species though we communed and we partook, and there was even a kind of sound come separately and come randomly partly from the mouth and partly from the potato, and we took at last to naming the separate grasses which is the way it is beside walls and under wires, and some of us grew so happy we started to whistle which is always a bad thing for beaks and for potatoes given how in abandonment your eyes might be closed and the horror of eagles might come down upon you. Stoop While on a stoop and eating boiled beef and while my hands are dripping with horseradish and while a crescent moon reflects itself in one of the windows on Sixth Avenue near what used to be the great Balduccis across from the womans prison and the library, though truth the sky is blue so it is probably April and its probably twenty, thirty years ago, and I was studying womens shoes before the long point killed the two end toes the same time I was killing time before the meeting at the Waverly inside a window as I recall for I had a burden then and I was given to meetings like that though even then I knew what it was like to be free of burdens for I was part mule, wasnt I, therefore I knew what freedom was and I am mule to this day and carry a weight, and I will to the graveyou will see me put it into the hole first, it is so cumbersome, with ears the color of the sun and compromised by wings, which I am too, and theres one mule I knew in the late 30s whose name was Molly, alas, not Sal, and she wasnt stupid and she was hardly stubborn and she loved apple trees and she was wise and loving, above rubies. Broken Pipes There were plenty of broken pipes in the ceiling and there were watery maps and such reminiscent of the places he wandered through though once it was the wallpaper made him stare, both that and the stains, and this time there was a nose you couldnt miss, you had to look at the funnies a hundred years ago to see it and sometimes it still shows up in the flesh when it is a finger or a fist although it is a peninsula the likes of Italy attached to a body at least the likes of Asia; and sometimes it was a mock-tragic for tears coasted down just such a nose and it was the pipes themselves that caused the sadness, caught as they were between two states; and that for him was enough of Art to make him dream when he loaded the furnace or turned the card in the window so the horse could stop betimes surrounded by steam and covered in frozen lather there on a hill across from a woods in the Year of Your Lord, ridiculous. Aliens How on the river the loosestrife has taken over, and how at the wedding there were spaghetti straps and one or two swollen bellies, and the judge who married them was wearing red sneakers and he was altogether a little pompous, and how the Guatemalans have moved into the borough and they are picked up in front of the Flower Mart sitting by the ice machine and there the bargaining takes place and both sides love light maybe because of the glittering between the trees and locked inside the droplets, and what the swollen river is up to and how New York City is stealing the water and what, with the weather events, there could be a failure of one or more of New Yorks three earthen dams or there could be a collapse of the steel tunnel feeding the city, and what the language is they argue with and whether its under the table the way they get paid or there are water-marked checks with complicated deductions, and what the birds are that eat the garbage and if a plastic milk box turned upside down is not a good enough table for coffee and donuts especially if the sugar goes neatly through the holes and red plastic makes music too and boots take the place of sneakers.

Like Fools Like fools we waited to hear the tomatoes; we knew what greenness meant on the vine and we were able to bypass the peppers, green and red and stop at the wall where nothing wet between the stones gave them their shape to start with since they were mostly flat and heavy and it was a vocable so pure I almost froze and it was a guttural reaching out to the pinesthe small rouge came from. The Crossing Not to forget that we had wooden guns once just as the Germans did when they invaded the Ruhr in 1936 and likewise we abandoned wallpaper for paint and there was an army of 500,000 monkeys who carried wooden rifles over their heads when they crossed the Delaware and how the Hessians applauded and how George Washington ordered grog for everyone there and since it was a Christian holiday they built the largest fire in New Jersey history and even burned their beautiful boat whose curves anticipated the helical waves and whose bottom unfolded, as it were, or shot through water something like a bottle or just skimmed the surface like a stone and everyone sitting stood up, not only Washington, and shouted just above Trenton almost the shortest night of the year and we spoke Deutsche and everyone hugged the person to his right although the left was not out of the question and we said, Peace, we always say it, the way they said it on the Rhine, the way they said it on the Danube, and now the Ohio, and now the Mississippi, the Susquehanna, the Allegheny, hug your monkey, kiss the nearest Romanian, kiss the nearest Greek. Dumb Fleabane again and I have another year to take up its redness and what the wayside is like with or without it and I have another year to charge across the wooden bridge and shake it again and take on the animals and fight the stupid bikes and the bikers who ride across with their legs spread out instead of walking their bikes so we didnt have to be pushed against the rails, they are so dumb and their bikes have so many dumb and useless gears like a dumb idiot box with 2,000 stations, only dumb ancient boxing and ancient movies worth anything, Jack Johnson or Marciano, even Orson Welles too much, give me the unself conscious, Karl Malden or Jean Harlow, for this is an old flower, it hates whatever it wants to, it grows where it wants and it loves goats because of their flattened eyes. Rapture It was a sound that had to exist by itself unheralded and you sat in an unsprung armchair with the wooden arms against your chest, your heart skipping, your one thought how you would get to the door or answer the phone, and you said love and you agreed with yourself though first it was grief, that stupid thing, and it was ejaculation not your own that horrified you and it was wistfulness for what would one day be Disney but still was rat-ridden and smelled of roach powder, and one of the radiators was cold and one was so hot you burned yourself at the wet socks but finally it was wind thank God for thatand while the building was bending you leaned to make things right for thats what you do at fifty miles per hour, and you said rapture sometimes, as well as wistfulness, as well as love. Casals You could either go back to the canary or you could listen to Bachs unaccompanied Suites for which, in both cases, you would have the same sofa, and you will be provided with a zigzag quilt to sleep under and a glass-top table and great fury, for out of those three things music comes; nor should you sleep if even the round muscles below the neck fall loose from their stringy moorings for you would miss a sob and you would miss a melody la red canary and la white as well and la canary, perched, as the cello was, on top of a wooden box and a small musician perched on top of the cello and every night a church full of wild canaries. Israel Grossman Roses are mostly used on goat meat and daisies on a piece of horse is finally out of the question for who can fool whom while sitting both either in or out, though it was sitting out I spilled my flower over my horsemeat and dug into my frites and there was sunshine partout and I stared into the sun without my glasses on my nose and with my eyes open la Huxley, who was teaching us how not to go blind while living in California with other English who were still that year strewing roses; it was the Anno Domini 1955 and it was my cousin Israel Grossman who for a flower went to the stalls for lavender, preaching Huxley.