[New-Poetry] Gerald Stern

[Anny Ballardini]

Happy Birthday to Him and to his luck in seeing a lucky life!

On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 2:24 AM, David Graham <grahamd at ripon.edu> wrote:

> Turns 84 years old today.
> A lucky life, I guess. . . .
>
>
> *Lucky Life*
>
> Lucky life isn't one long string of horrors
> and there are moments of peace, and pleasure, as I lie in between the
> blows.
> Lucky I don't have to wake up in Phillipsburg, New Jersey,
> on the hill overlooking Union Square or the hill overlooking
> Kuebler Brewery or the hill overlooking SS. Philip and James
> but have my own hills and my own vistas to come back to.
>
> Each year I go down to the island I add
> one more year to the darkness;
> and though I sit up with my dear friends
> trying to separate the one year from the other,
> this one from the last, that one from the former,
> another from another,
> after a while they all get lumped together,
> the year we walked to Holgate,
> the year our shoes got washed away,
> the year it rained,
> the year my tooth brought misery to us all.
>
> This year was a crisis. I knew it when we pulled
> the car onto the sand and looked for the key.
> I knew it when we walked up the outside steps
> and opened the hot icebox and began the struggle
> with swollen drawers and I knew it when we laid out
> the sheets and separated the clothes into piles
> and I knew it when we made our first rush onto
> the beach and I knew it when we finally sat
> on the porch with coffee cups shaking in our hands.
>
> My dream is I'm walking through Phillipsburg, New Jersey,
> and I'm lost on South Main Street. I am trying to tell,
> by memory, which statue of Christopher Columbus
> I have to look for, the one with him slumped over
> and lost in weariness or the one with him
> vaguely guiding the way with a cross and globe in
> one hand and a compass in the other.
> My dream is I'm in the Eagle Hotel on Chamber Street
> sitting at the oak bar, listening to two
> obese veterans discussing Hawaii in 1942,
> and reading the funny signs over the bottles.
> My dream is I sleep upstairs over the honey locust
> and sit on the side porch overlooking the stone culvert
> with a whole new set of friends, mostly old and humorless.
>
> Dear waves, what will you do for me this year?
> Will you drown out my scream?
> Will you let me rise through the fog?
> Will you fill me with that old salt feeling?
> Will you let me take my long steps in the cold sand?
> Will you let me lie on the white bedspread and study
> the black clouds with the blue holes in them?
> Will you let me see the rusty trees and the old monoplanes one more year?
> Will you still let me draw my sacred figures
> and move the kites and the birds around with my dark mind?
>
> Lucky life is like this. Lucky there is an ocean to come to.
> Lucky you can judge yourself in this water.
> Lucky you can be purified over and over again.
> Lucky there is the same cleanliness for everyone.
> Lucky life is like that. Lucky life. Oh lucky life.
> Oh lucky lucky life. Lucky life.
>
>
> --Gerald Stern
>
>
>
> ========================================
> David Graham
> grahamd at ripon.edu
>
> Home Page:
> http://web.mac.com/drjazz
>
> Poetry Library:
> http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html
> ==========================================
>
>
>
>
>
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>


-- 
Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html
I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing
star!
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