Blessed
as We
Were
Late Selected and
New Poems, 2000–2018
Gerald
Stern
W.W.NORTON & COMPANY
Independent Publisher Since 1923
For Anne Marie, whether in snow or sun. Always.
Contents
from Last Blue (2000)
One of the Smallest
Pluma
Against the Crusades
Someone to Watch Over Me
Wailing
His Cup
Greek Neighbor Home from the Hospital
Pennsylvania Bio
Massachusetts Song
A Rose Between the Sheets
Street of the Butchers
Last Home
Larry Levis Visits Easton, PA, During a November Freeze
Short Words
Night
Drowning on the Pamet River
Mexican
Paris
Already April
March 27
August 20–21
This Life
Snowdrop
Last Blue
Kingdom
from American Sonnets (2002)
Winter Thirst
June
Aberdeen Proving Grounds, 1946
For the Bee
Alone
September, 1999
You
The Ink Spots
Exordium and Terminus
In Time
Les Neiges d’Antan
Hydrangea
Spider
Iris
Grand Hotel
Sam and Morris
Burning
Studebaker
Cost
Still Burning
Roses
Hearts
Slash of Red
Box of Cigars
Justice
American Heaven
from Everything Is Burning (2005)
La Pergola
E.P. 1
Albatross 1
Never Went to Birdland
The Snow on the River
Sylvia
Hemingway’s House
May 30
May Frick Be Damned
The Trent Lott, the McNamara Blues
The Tie
Boléro
Stern Country
Gimbel’s
Lilies
Loyal Carp
Golden Rule
L’Chaim
Cigars
Shouldering
Bejewels
Bio
Battle of the Bulge
Mars
Driven
Shepherd
Homesick
The Law
She Was a Dove
from Save the Last Dance (2008)
Diogenes
Traveling Backwards
What For?
Bronze Roosters
Blue Like That
59 N. Sitgreaves
Spaghetti
Love
Before Eating
Asphodel
What Then?
One Poet
Wordsworth
Lorca
Death by Wind
Rose in Your Teeth
Save the Last Dance for Me
from In Beauty Bright (2012)
February 22
Stoop
Aliens
Dumb
Gracehoper
Sugar
Sinai
Domestic
Frogs
In Beauty Bright
Journey
Died in the Mills
Rosenblatt
Iberia
Independence Day
The Name
Broken Glass
Soll Ihr Gornisht Helfen
Voltage
For D.
Rage
Love
Nostalgia
Sleeping with Birds
My Libby
86th Birthday at MacDowell
Plaster Pig
Apt. 5 FW I
Counting
Day of Grief
Droit de Faim
1946
Bio III
from Divine Nothingness (2015)
Bio IV
Ruth
Dolly
D.
Limping
Love
Top of a Mountain
Hell
Mule
Wilderness
Not Me
After Ritsos
After the Church Reading Against the War
112th Street (1980)
Free Lunch
Maryanne
What Brings Me Here?
Durante
The World We Should Have Stayed In
Divine Nothingness
He Who Is Filthy
Lifewatch
from Galaxy Love (2017)
Bio VIII
Hiphole
Blue Particles
Ghost
Ich Bin Jude
Azaleas
Perish the Day
Poverty
Bess, Zickel, Warhol, Arendt
Merwin
Route 29
Two Boats
Silence
A Walk Back from the Restaurant
The Year of Everything
Two Things
Larry
Sunset
Orson
Gelato
Ancient Chinese Egg
Loneliness
Hamlet Naked
Fall 1960
Skylark
The Other
New Poems
The Camargue
Red and Swollen
Baby Rat
The Cost of Love
Hearts Amiss
Hebrish
Cherries
No Kissing There
Lake Country
Wet Peach
March 17th
No House
Mount Hope Cemetery
Red Jungle Fowl
Knucklebones
Frutta da Looma
Adonis
Tony Was Right
Blessed as We Were
The Beautiful
Torn Coat
From Wackadoodle
Forfor
Elder Blues
Under Your Wing
Punching Holes
Never
The Late Celan
Warbler
At the Memorial of Al Dazzo, 1939–2017
Acknowledgments
Index of Titles and First Lines
from Last Blue
One of the Smallest
Made of the first gray light
that came into my room,
made of the hole itself
in the cracked window blind,
thus made of sunshine, thus made of
gas and water, one of the
smallest, smallest, made of
that which seizes the eye,
that which an eagle needs
and even a mole, a mole, a
rabbit, a quail, a lilac,
it was uncreated. I
fought for it, I tore down
walls, I cut my trees,
I lay on my back, I had a
rock to support my head, I
swam in two directions,
I lay down smiling, the sun
made my eyes water, what
the wind and the dirt took away
and what was abraded and what was
exhausted, exhausted, was only
a just reflection. The sun
slowly died and I much
quicker, much quicker, I raced
; until I was wrinkled but I was
lost as the star was and I
was losing light, I was dying
before I was born, thus I was
blue at the start, though I was
red much later, much later,
for I was a copy, but I was
something exploding and I was
born for just that but fought
against it, against it. The light
of morning was gray with a green
and that of evening was almost a
rose in one sky though it was
white in another—at least
in one place the light comes back—
and I disappeared like a fragment
of gas you’d call it, or fire,
fragment by fragment I think,
cooled down and changed into metal,
captured and packaged as it will be
in one or two more centuries
and turned then into a bell—
not a bridge, not a hammer—
really the tongue of a bell,
if bells will still be in use then,
and I will sing as a bell does,
you’d call it tolling—such
was my burst of light seen from
a certain viewpoint though seen from
another, another, no sudden
flash but a long slow burning
as in the olive tree burning,
as in the carob, as slow as the
olive, still giving up chocolate
after two thousand years, that’s
what we lacked, our light
was like the comet’s, like a
flash of fosfur, a burst
from a Spanish matchbox, the wood
broken in two, the flame
lasting six seconds—I counted—
that is, when the fosfur worked,
two or three lives lived out
in a metal ashtray, one of them
nothing but carbon, one of them
wood partway, poor thing that
died betimes, one snuffed out
just at the neck where the pinkish
head was twisted the wrong way
and one of them curling up
even after burning, thus the
light I loved stacked in a box
depending on two rough sides
and on the wind and on the
gentleness of my hand,
the index finger pressed
against the wood, the flash
of fire always a shock,
always new and enlightening,
the same explosion forever—
I call it forever—forever—
sitting with my mouth open
in some unbearable blue,
bridal wreath in my right hand,
since this is the season, my left hand
scratching and scratching, the sun
in front now. How did dogwood
get into this yard? How did
the iris manage to get here?
And grow that way? I live
without a beard, I’m streaked
with a kind of purple, my hands
are folded and overlapping, I
love the rain, I am
a type of Persian, where I am
and in this season I blossom
for fifteen hours a day, I
walk through streams of some sort—
I like that thinking—corpuscles
bombard my eyes—I call it
light—it was what gave me
life in the first place—no no
shame in wandering, no shame
in adoring—what it what it
was was so primitive
we had to disturb it—call it
disturbing, call it interfering—
at five in the morning in front of
the dumpster, at six looking down
on the river, a little tired from
the two hundred steps, my iris
in bloom down there, my maples
blowing a little, I was
a mole and a rabbit, I was
a stone at first, I turned
garish for a while and burned.
Pluma
Once, when there were no riches, somewhere in southern
Mexico I lost my only pen in the
middle of one of my dark and flashy moments
and euchred the desk clerk of my small hotel
out of his only piece of bright equipment
in an extravagance of double-dealing,
nor can I explain the joy in that and how I
wrote for my life, though unacknowledged, and clearly
it was unimportant and I had the money and
all I had to do was look up the Spanish and
I was not for a second constrained and there was
no glory, not for a second, it had nothing to
do with the price of the room, for example, it only
made writing what it should be and the life we
led more rare than what we thought and tested
the art of giving back, and someplace near me,
as if there had to be a celebration
to balance out the act of chicanery,
a dog had started to bark and lights were burning.
Against the Crusades
Don’t think that being a left-handed nightingale was all legerdemain
or that I am that small angry bastard who hates whores,
only I disguised it by laughing; or that it’s
easy leaving a restaurant by yourself and holding
your other hand against the bricks to keep from falling;
or anybody can play the harp, or anybody knows the words
to “Blue Sunday” and “After the Ball Was Just Over You Dropped Dead.”
If you can stand Strauss then so can I,
oh filthy Danube, oh filthy Delaware, oh filthy Allegheny.
And anyone who never opened a Murphy bed
night after night for seven years without ripping
the sheet and had neither desk nor dresser can’t walk
in my shoes or wear my crocodile T-shirt.
And anyone thinking that a Jew being a Jew
is something you should apologize for as if Richard
Wagner just stepped into the room wearing a bronze
headpiece with a pink feather sticking out of it
is nothing less than a fool himself who buys into
dead stoves and dead feelings and doesn’t know the
sweetness of his own lips and the tenderness of his fingers.
God bless the Jewish comedians who never denigrated Blacks,
and God bless the good gentiles and God bless Mayor Scully
and Councilman Wolk and Rosey Rowswell and Eleanor Roosevelt;
and the chorus of Blue Saints behind Bishop Elder Beck
and the old theater on Wylie Avenue I visited every Sunday night
to hear them sing and pray and hear him preach.
God bless the Lucca Cafe. God bless the green benches
in Father Demo Square and the dear Italian lady
carrying a huge bouquet of red and white roses
in front of her like a candelabra and the tiny white
baby’s breath that filled the empty spaces with clapping and singing.
Someone to Watch Over Me
It is not knowing what a mulberry sidewalk looks like
in the first place that will start you up sliding, then dancing,
though if it weren’t for my bird-like interior and how I shake
one foot then the other I would have not seen the encroachment
myself; and if it weren’t for the squirrel who lives in pure greed
and balances whatever he touches with one hand then another
I would have picked the berries up one berry at a time
and laid them out to dry beside my crinkled lily and my pink daisy.
In this d
ecade I am taking care of the things I love. I’m
sorting everything out starting, if I have to, with the
smallest blossom, the smallest, say, salmon-colored petunia.
I’m eating slowly, dipping one crumb at a time in my beer,
and singing—as I never did before—one word at a time
in my true voice, which is after all a quiet second tenor
that came upon me after my first descent into manhood
and after a disgrace involving my seventh-grade music teacher
and a sudden growth of hair. If it weren’t for my large lips
I could have played the French horn. If I didn’t like mulberries—
one among a million, I know, and eat them—without sugar—
the way a grackle does his from the downtrodden branches
I wouldn’t be standing on a broken chair, and I wouldn’t be shaking;
and if I didn’t slide from place to place and walk
with a toothbrush in my pocket and touch one bush
for belief and one for just beauty I wouldn’t be singing.
Wailing
Walking from west to east past the living
dead man on the corner of Grove and Fourth
north side of the bank I closed my eyes
so I wouldn’t have to see his stumps and the red
mouth without a tongue and make the water
rush through my ears so I wouldn’t have to hear him.
And sitting on the bench across the street
I exchanged ideas with the woman next to me
on a question in ethics, Kant and Schlegel; I made
a reference to early Herodotus, she stuck by
Bentham, pleasure and pain, though she was loyal
also to Hobbes, he of the loathsome universe.
While the sun, though who would notice it, was covered
in what the older Plato would call slime
and the one tree that didn’t have metal growing
through it shook with life—I’d say it was leaves
but birds rushed by and one was Bentham and one
was Hobbes himself, one of the true slime-chasers.
And sitting across from me although the lice
drove him crazy was the master of nuance
lifting a wing and eating, he of the blinking
eyes we waited for standing alone
and walking along the slats of his bench, the prince
of bleeding mouths, I’m sure, and duke of welts,
not to mention organs erupting and faces
some black and some red but all with huge creases and I,
with a scholar like that, I kept him in bread, I gave him
one Guggenheim after another, even I
gave him a Hobbes, a half a bagel, with seeds
from the opium tree and did my drumming, hands
on the cement armrests, now beginning to clap,
and a tongue of my own inside my mouth, still thinking,
still talking, I will learn to forgive, still lucky
Blessed as We Were Page 1