Poetry by Guest Contributor, Gerald Stern

Space again for a predatory wasp
to sing you to sleep and good cracks in the sidewalk
where the trees spread year by year creating broken
steps either up or down and two garages
from 1929, I know it as sure as
I know the hollow blocks though I’d have to
get into urban archeology from
Pittsburgh east as well as the decades and that’s
not my job, though I don’t know what my job is,
mourning, finding a word or—I don’t care—
a number—8—showing what’s despicable,
clearing the air, remembering, though not official,
I’m not official, and not precise, I just
ingest, devour, I said once “reconciling
two oblivious worlds,” I said “getting ready,”
naming names, but for myself, counting
my cousins, I used to say seventy-three,
I always go by mothers;
maybe it’s hiding behind a tree, maybe it’s
getting inside the tree, maybe it’s
learning to love the one or two breeds of dogs
I didn’t love before—say boxers, say stiff-haired
small brown cross-breeds, say it’s
walking again as far as the Flea, say it’s
limping, even if I don’t have to.

At last an electric fence so I can be safe from the deer for a minute
and dig a deep hole under the props so I can sneak in like a weasel
but nobody loves me enough to bring me a scotch on ice as in the old days
and we may as well be in Norway how it’s 2 a.m. and I’m sitting
in an Adirondack chair by a pool of water under a cherry tree
for it’s never night but forty times worse than that it’s never day;
and at a certain point in more than one country
there is a day given over to pure confusion which
if you had any sense you would skip, weasel or no weasel,
electric fence or no, Mongolian, Neanderthal, orangutan,
black and white sheep hound or no, even if the pool is heated
even if the cherries are sweet, even if a wolf
with too much milk started the agonies in the first place,
even if the Little King drives by in a twelve-cylinder 1920 Studebaker
and has a step ladder.

One of America’s most celebrated and prolific poets, Gerald Stern is the author of seventeen poetry collections, including last year’s In Beauty Bright. He is a National Book Award winner, a recipient of the National Jewish Book Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors.

Stern is currently an MFA faculty member at Drew University. He has held tenure at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, taught at Temple University, and, in 2002, he co-founded the MFA program at New England College. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and lives in Lambertville, New Jersey.