Chapter One Eggshell FOR LARRY LEVIS, 1946-1996 The color of life is an almost pale white robin's green that once was bluer when it was in the nest, before the jay deranged the straw and warm flesh was in the shell. I found it while doing my forty-five minute walk between two doors beside some bushes and flowers. I put it in one of my pockets keeping some space around it to protect the pale green, an idiot carrying a dead child inside him, something that might have broken out anyway, a blue afterbirth shoved out of the nest. I laid my dead like eggs on the table, twelve tombstones to a box. I buried dread that way, my telephone calls and letters, and on the way I walked into a side yard and straightened a brick--for it was May--and chased a garter snake into his rainspout; and since it was morning and it was hot already I put the eggshell under a leather chair and thought of our trip to New Orleans and used the end of a broom to prop up a rosebush, the way we do, sweet Larry. Lilacs for Ginsberg I was most interested in what they looked like dead and I could learn to love them so I waited for three or four days until the brown set in and there was a certain reverse curl to the leaf by which in putting my finger on the main artery beside the throat I knew the blood had passed on to someplace else and he was talking to two demons from the afterlife although it was just like the mountains in New York State since there was smoke in the sky and they were yelping and he was speaking in his telltale New Jersey English and saying the same thing over and over the way he did when he was on stage and his white shirt was perfect and the lack of air and of light aged the lilacs but he was sitting on a lily in one or two seconds and he forgot about Eighth Street and fame and cancer and bent down to pick a loose diamond but more important than that he talked to the demons in French and sang with his tinny voice nor did he go on about his yellowing sickness but counted the clusters and said they were only stars and there were two universes intertwined, the white and the purple, or they were just crumbs or specks that he could sprinkle on his pie nor could he exactly remember his sorrow except when he pressed the lilacs to his face or when he stooped to bury himself in the bush, then for a moment he almost did, for lilacs clear the mind and all the elaborations are possible in their dear smell and even his death which was so good and thoughtful became, for a moment, sorrowful. 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. The Dog What I was doing with my white teeth exposed like that on the side of the road I don't know, and I don't know why I lay beside the sewer so that lover of dead things could come back with his pencil sharpened and his piece of white paper. I was there for a good two hours whistling dirges, shrieking a little, terrifying hearts with my whimpering cries before I died by pulling the one leg up and stiffening. There is a look we have with the hair of the chin curled in mid-air, there is a look with the belly stopped in the midst of its greed. The lover of dead things stoops to feel me, his hand is shaking. I know his mouth is open and his glasses are slipping. I think his pencil must be jerking and the terror of smell--and sight--is overtaking him; I know he has that terrified faraway look that death brings--he is contemplating, I want him to touch my forehead once and rub my muzzle before he lifts me up and throws me into that little valley. I hope he doesn't use his shoe for fear of touching me; I know, or used to know, the grasses down there; I think I knew a hundred smells, I hope the dog's way doesn't overtake him, one quick push, barely that, and the mind freed, something else, some other thing, to take its place. Great heart, great human heart, keep loving me as you lift me, give me your tears, great loving stranger, remember the death of dogs, forgive the yapping, forgive the shitting, let there be pity, give me your pity. How could there be enough? I have given my life for this, emotion has ruined me, oh lover, I have exchanged my wildness--little tricks with the mouth and feet, with the tail, my tongue is a parrot's, I am a rampant horse, I am a lion, I wait for the cookie, I snap my teeth-- as you have taught me, oh distant and brilliant and lonely. I Remember Galileo I remember Galileo describing the mind as a piece of paper blown around by the wind, and I loved the sight of it sticking to a tree or jumping into the backseat of a car, and for years I watched paper leap through my cities; but yesterday I saw the mind was a squirrel caught crossing Route 80 between the wheels of a giant truck, dancing back and forth like a thin leaf, or a frightened string, for only two seconds living on the white concrete before he got away, his life shortened by all that terror, his head jerking, his yellow teeth ground down to dust. It was the speed of the squirrel and his lowness to the ground, his great purpose and the alertness of his dancing, that showed me the difference between him and paper. Paper will do in theory, when there is time to sit back in a metal chair and study shadows; but for this life I need a squirrel, his clawed feet spread, his whole soul quivering, the hot wind rushing through his hair, the loud noise shaking him from head to tail. O philosophical mind, O mind of paper, I need a squirrel finishing his wild dash across the highway, rushing up his green ungoverned hillside. Copyright © 1998 Gerald Stern. All rights reserved.
