Winter Thirst
I grew up with bitumous in my mouth
and sulfur smelling like rotten eggs and I
first started to cough because my lungs were like cardboard;
and what we called snow was gray with black flecks
that were like glue when it came to snowballs and made
them hard and crusty, though we still ate the snow
anyhow, and as for filth, well, start with
smoke, I carried it with me I know everywhere
and someone sitting beside me in New York or Paris
would know where I came from, we would go in for dinner—
red meat or brown choucroute—and he would
guess my hill, and we would talk about soot
and what a dirty neck was like and how
the white collar made a fine line;
and I told him how we pulled heavy wagons
and loaded boxcars every day from five
to one A.M. and how good it was walking
empty-handed to the no. 69 streetcar
and how I dreamed of my bath and how the water
was black and soapy then and what the void
was like and how a candle instructed me.
Apocalypse
Of all sixty of us I am the only one who went
to the four corners though I don't say it
out of pride but more like a type of regret,
and I did it because there was no one I truly believed
in though once when I climbed the hill in Skye
and arrived at the rough table I saw the only other
elder who was a vegetarian—in Scotland—
and visited Orwell and rode a small motorcycle
to get from place to place; and I immediately
stopped eating fish and meat and lived on soups;
and we wrote each other in the middle and late fifties
though one day I got a letter from his daughter
that he had died in an accident; he was
I'm sure of it, an angel who flew in midair
with one eternal gospel to proclaim
to those inhabiting the earth and every nation;
and now that I go through my papers every day
I search for his letters but to my regular shame
I have even forgotten his name, that messenger
who came to me with tablespoons of blue lentils.
Egg
And I have been a mother to geese and what not,
I hired forty-five poets in Pennsylvania
and sent them to the northern and western reaches
after I trained them at Lewisburg during the summer
institute and visited the schools and
traveled in an old Toyota in all the
sixty-seven counties and lived in a hotel in
Harrisburg three days a week and talked to them
about love and money and teaching and poetry;
and I was head of a teachers' union and I was
a chair, as we say, and I bought the food for my own
family and I did the Band-Aids, and I gave
advice in three or four cities, and there was a small
goose who followed me everywhere, honking with love,
and I was exhausted; I hated him, always on top
of me—I wanted to kick him—my third child!—
He was a machine, food on one end, shit on the
other—and there was an egg I had to break with a
hammer, I paid a quarter for it, the omelette was
orange, and huge, I was so hungry then.
(c) 2002 by Gerald Stern. All rights reserved.
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