Larry Levis Visits Easton, PA During a November Freeze, 24
Last Blue, 39
Last Home, 23
Late Celan, The, 264
Law, The, 104
Les Neiges d’Antan, 57
Let not a grocery bag of bloody napkins come between us, 153
Lifewatch, 192
Like Frida, who had a bellyful of nihilists, 247
Lilies, 89
Limping, 174
Loneliness, 222
Look what it is to have forgotten, 256
Lorca, 126
Love (A part of me eats her fingers . . . ), 116
Love (I loved your sweet neck . . . ), 155
Love (A wet towel so many times . . . ), 175
Loyal Carp, 90
Made of the first gray light, 3
March 17th, 242
March 27, 34
Mars, 99
Maryanne, 185
Massachusetts Song, 20
May 30, 82
May Frick Be Damned, 83
Me trying to understand say whence, 66
Merwin, 205
Mexican, 30
More than anything else it was, 125
Mostly I opened my napkin with a flair, 37
Mount Hope Cemetery, 244
Mule, 178
My Deborah was a judge too, 173
My Libby, 158
My song of the pea has me, 242
Name, The, 149
Never, 263
Never Went to Birdland, 78
Never went to Birdland, so what, went to the Y, 78
Night, 28
No House, 243
No Kissing There, 239
No one thought of naming his dog Sinai, 139
No sense burning the red ants, 263
Nostalgia, 156
Not infrequently destroyed as bits of paper, 115
Not Me, 180
Nothing by or for itself, the sound of, 222
Nothing matters but the quality of the affection, 76
Once I was a postwar doctoral student, 164
Once, when there were no riches, somewhere in southern, 7
One hand was holding the rail and one hand, 165
One man stood apart and announced to the others, 181
One of the Smallest, 3
One Poet, 124
Only, to hear him scream, you had to know, 71
Orson, 218
Orson Welles has been my philosopher, 218
Other, The, 227
Paris, 32
Pennsylvania Bio, 18
Perish the Day, 201
Plaster Pig, 160
Please listen, there’s a thing back there I killed, 77
Pluma, 7
Poverty, 202
Poverty I learned from the romance of my grandfather, 202
Punching Holes, 262
Rage, 154
Reading a Japanese novel during the one day of, 133
Red and Swollen, 232
Red are her eyes, for she was a dove once, 105
Red Jungle Fowl, 243
Refusing to listen to just any song that comes my way, 195
Rose Between the Sheets, A, 21
Rose in Your Teeth, 128
Rose in your teeth, my darling, rose in your teeth, 128
Rosenblatt, 145
Roses, 67
Route 29, 206
Ruth, 171
Sam and Morris, 62
Save the Last Dance for Me, 129
September, 1999, 52
She was a darling with her roses, though what I, 113
She Was a Dove, 105
Shepherd, 101
Short Words, 26
Shouldering, 94
Silence, 210
Sinai, 139
Since it is June already I could be back there, 48
Skylark, 226
Slash of Red, 69
Sleeping with Birds, 157
Snow on the River, The, 79
Snow on the river is my guess though any, 79
Snowdrop, 38
So one day when the azalea bush was firing, 86
Soll Ihr Gornisht Helfen, 151
Some Austrian Jew or other who dipped his head, 151
Some dried-up phlox so old the blue was white, 26
Someone to Watch Over Me, 10
Space again for a predatory wasp, 174
Spaghetti, 115
Spider, 59
Stalin comes to mind who tried to destroy, 156
Stern Country, 87
Still Burning, 66
Stoop, 134
Street of the Butchers, 22
Studebaker, 64
Suddenly there was no house, 243
Sugar, 138
Sunset, 217
Sylvia, 80
Taffeta for you and taffeta for me, a rose, 21
That is the education of a tree, 20
That’s my suit Johnny Mercer is wearing, 226
The clothes, the food, the nickel-coated iron, 188
The dead warbler started to sing, 267
The fact that no one had ever seen Lorca run, 126
The fence itself can’t breathe, jewelweeds are choking, 50
The hat he bought in 1949 for, 34
The larger our hearts were, the more, 68
The late Celan, 264
The lock was on the right although I had to, 60
The most revolting thing of all was carrying, 145
The name of the alley is Pine Street where the rottweiler, 23
The only star last night was cloud-riven, 100
The other time I wore a tie my friend Mark, 85
The part that we avoided was not the heart, 141
The rain came down for hours, 231
The same cracked hoarse nasal sexy laugh—, 93
The second day in a row I watched the same, 33
The thing about the dove was how he cried in, 54
The time I took Anne Marie to what had been, 61
The two nuns I saw I urged them to, 219
The way a fly who dies in sugar water, 97
The way it was in the eighties, 205
The world is always burning, you should fly, 104
Then, fifty dollars for a Hungarian, 144
There goes that toast again, four chipped, 92
There had to be more than one day of rain, 38
There isn’t a bee swimming in milk, 200
There was a rose called Guy de Maupassant, 67
There was a way I could find out if Ruth, 171
There were packs of dogs to deal with and broomsticks, 147
There’s no right and wrong here, 262
Thinking if trees suffer pain from the cutting, 248
This is the place, isn’t it?, 206
This Life, 37
Those lilies of the field, one Sunday night, 89
Tie, The, 85
Tony Was Right, 250
Tony was right, I traveled by Greyhound bus, 250
Top of a Mountain, 176
Torn Coat, 256
Traveling Backwards, 110
Traveling backwards in time is almost nothing, 110
Trent Lott, the MacNamara Blues, The, 84
Try a small black radio from any year, 64
Two Boats, 208
Two Things, 214
Under Your Wing, 261
Voltage, 152
Wailing, 11
Walk Back from the Restaurant, A, 212
Walking from west to east past the living, 11
Warbler, 267
We return to the blood pudding, 161
We were either fighting against time, 240
We were surrounded by buttercup and phlox, 94
Weird the thing about fathers, 268
Wet Peach, 241
What Brings Me Here?, 186
What For?, 111
What good did it do him to sit in the white tub, 178
What it was like to sit with Mr. Fox, 96
What Then?, 123
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br /> What you say bout Orson Welles his folly, his, 99
When it comes to girls the Chihuahua, 129
Where art thou now, thou Ruth whose husband in the snow, 57
Where he hung the bird feeder a month ago, 16
Where is the mind that asked whether the drugstore, 63
Where there used to be a telephone booth here, 183
While on a stoop and eating boiled beef, 134
Who was it threatened to murder, 199
Why do you always climb an extra pair of stairs, 159
Wilderness, 179
Winter Thirst, 47
Wordsworth, 125
World We Should Have Stayed In, The, 188
Year of Everything, The, 213
You, 53
You could have stared all day, 198
You could mistake the wind itself for a voice, 176
You know I know there is just enough light, 123
You know my story better than I do and if, 53
You remind me always it’s thirteen years, 162
You want to get the color blue right, 39
ALSO BY GERALD STERN
Galaxy Love
Divine Nothingness
In Beauty Bright
Early Collected Poems, 1965–1992
What I Can’t Bear Losing: Notes from a Life
Save the Last Dance
Everything Is Burning
Not God After All
American Sonnets
Last Blue
This Time: New and Selected Poems
Odd Mercy
Bread Without Sugar
Two Long Poems
Leaving Another Kingdom
Lovesick
Paradise Poems
The Red Coal
Lucky Life
Rejoicings
The Naming of the Beasts
The Pineys
Copyright © 2020, 2017, 2015, 2012, 2008, 2005, 2002, 2000 by Gerald Stern
All rights reserved
First Edition
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Stern, Gerald, date– author.
Title: Blessed as we were : late selected and new poems, 2000–2018 / Gerald Stern.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : W.W. Norton & Company, [2020]
Identifiers: LCCN 2019036827 | ISBN 9781324002338 (hardcover) |
ISBN 9781324002345 (epub)
Classification: LCC PS3569.T3888 A6 2020 | DDC 811/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019036827
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Blessed as We Were Page 17