by Amy Gerstler
HYMN TO THE NECK
Tamed by starched collars or looped by the noose, all hail the stem that holds up the frail cranial buttercup. The neck throbs with dread of the guillotine’s kiss, while the silly, bracelet-craving wrists chafe in their handcuffs. Your one and only neck, home to glottis, tonsils, and many other highly specialized pieces of meat, is covered with stubble. Three mornings ago, undeserving sinner though she is, yours truly got to watch you shave in the bath. Soap matted your chest hair. A clouded hand mirror reflected a piece of your cheek. Vapor rose all around like spirit-infested mist in some fabled rainforest. The throat is a road. Speech is its pilgrim. Something pulses visibly in your neck as the words hand me a towel flower from your mouth.
IN THE ASPIRIN ORCHARD
O analgesia trees! How your powdery
fruit soothes. Ancient tasting tablets
chalky as fossils dissolve on our tongues,
tame our pains. Wearing relief’s
crown of flowers, sex re-enters
the room, uninvited, shy—
disguised as religion, robed in blessed
caresses that address every last malady.
Reckoned rightly, all suffices.
Misgivings licked clean, I abandoned
my love under a budding aspirin tree.
He was singing the chorus
of Let’s Pretend it’s Snowing.
He had a sleeping disease,
and often nodded off while
I was talking. Our treasure’s
buried in clay pots where I first
nursed tender aspirin saplings
into bloom. I haven’t the heart
to dig it up. Years have passed.
Our orchard prospered and spread.
Now hired pickers fill linen
aprons with harvests of dusty pills.
Like crumbs of asteroid
or hailstones, clusters
of ripening aspirins hang,
tiny alluring lanterns,
blurrily aglow. The merest sight
of them palely burns aches away.
Darling, do I hear the whining
of distant violins?
Let us kneel, for the age
of fevers is upon us.
Notes on the Poems
“Touring the Doll Hospital” has some lines collaged into it from Walt Whitman’s letters written while he was nursing wounded soldiers during the Civil War. The quotes appear in quotation marks in the poem. Two images at the end of the poem are also drawn from those letters, in which Whitman says of one injured soldier, “I do what I can for him . . . sit near him for hours if he wishes it,” and of another, “He expressed a great desire for good strong tea.”
In “Witch Songs,” the line “They’re all witches under the skin” is a slightly altered version of a line Bugs Bunny says at the end of a cartoon.
In “Listen, Listen, Listen” the line “At the sound of your voice/heaven opens its portals to me” is from a Rogers and Hart song. That poem contains three or four reworked lines from The Human Voice: A Concise Manual on Training the Speaking and Singing Voice by Franklin D. Lawson, Harper & Bros., 1944.
“The New Dog” contains some lines and language, in slightly altered form, from the Old Testament, Proverbs 1:23 and 1:27.
“In the Aspirin Orchard” contains an inversion of the poet Christina Rossetti’s line: “all suffices reckoned rightly.”
About the Author
Amy Gerstler is a writer of poetry, nonfiction, and journalism who lives in Los Angeles. Her previous eleven books include Medicine, Crown of Weeds, which won a California Book Award, Nerve Storm, and Bitter Angel, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her poems have appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, and several volumes of Best American Poetry and The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry, and her journalism and art criticism have appeared in Artforum, The Village Voice, Los Angeles Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Art and Antiques, and numerous other publications. She teaches in the graduate fine arts department at Art Center, College of Design, in Pasadena, California, and is a member of the core faculty of the Master’s program in critical writing there. She is a member of the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars MFA program at Bennington College in Vermont, and has taught writing and/or art at the California Institute of the Arts, Cal Tech, the University of California at Irvine, the University of Southern California, and elsewhere.
PENGUIN POETS
TED BERRIGAN
Selected Poems
The Sonnets
PHILIP BOOTH
Lifelines
JIM CARROLL
Fear of Dreaming
Void of Course
BARBARA CULLY
Desire Reclining
CARL DENNIS
New and Selected Poems
1974-2004
Practical Gods
DIANE DI PRIMA
Loba
STUART DISCHELL
Dig Safe
STEPHEN DOBYNS
Pallbearers Envying the
One Who Rides
The Porcupine’s Kisses
ROGER FANNING
Homesick
AMY GERSTLER
Crown of Weeds
Ghost Girl
Medicine
Nerve Storm
DEBORA GREGER
Desert Fathers, Uranium
Daughters
God
ROBERT HUNTER
Sentinel
BARBARA JORDAN
Trace Elements
MARY KARR
Viper Rum
JACK KEROUAC
Book of Blues
Book of Haikus
JOANNE KYGER
As Ever
ANN LAUTERBACH
If in Time
On a Stair
PHYLLIS LEVIN
Mercury
WILLIAM LOGAN
Macbeth in Venice
Night Battle
Vain Empires
DEREK MAHON
Selected Poems
MICHAEL MCCLURE
Huge Dreams: San
Francisco and Beat
Poems
CAROL MUSKE
An Octave Above Thunder
ALICE NOTLEY
The Descent of Alette
Disobedience
Mysteries of Small Houses
LAWRENCE RAAB
The Probable World
Visible Signs
STEPHANIE STRICKLAND V
ANNE WALDMAN
Kill or Cure
Marriage: A Sentence
PHILIP WHALEN
Overtime: Selected Poems
ROBERT WRIGLEY
Lives of the Animals
Reign of Snakes
JOHN YAU
Borrowed Love Poems