Gerald Stern: A Remembrance
This was previously published in January 2013 on Crunchable, an online literary magazine for Washington College alumni, edited by Michael Duck. Last year, I dug it out and mailed a copy of it to Gerald Stern, along with a note. He wrote me back, on my birthday, thanking me for thinking of him and sharing the piece. He is still alive and will be 95 on February 22nd.
I nervously unlocked the door of my unfortunate two-door ’93 aqua-colored Toyota Tercel. The license plate read ELAFUNT. I had gotten rid of the stuffed elephants that used to adorn the back window. I wanted to impress my important passenger. I don’t think that the black pleather seats accomplished that endeavor. Nevertheless, my boyfriend Pete climbed awkwardly into the backseat and the formidable poet Gerald Stern took his place in the front next to me. It was September, so I’m not sure if it mattered that the car didn’t have any air conditioning, but it couldn’t have been the nicest ride he’d ever gotten.
He was gruff and we were shy college sophomores and students of Dr. Robert Mooney, the champion of such writers as Stern. When Dr. Mooney asked me to drive Mr. Stern to the train station after his visit to Washington College, I felt very honored. His visit to the school as part of the Living Writers course I was taking had been inspiring, if not intimidating. It was the first time I had ever met a real poet.
I decided upon embarking on our trip that we should listen to some music, and so I put in a tape of Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, The Symphony of Sorrows, with Dawn Upshaw singing soprano. Maybe my subconscious thought was that Stern, with his Polish ancestry, would appreciate the Polish composer. It’s a haunting piece. The strings start out quiet and low and then it builds and builds into this amazing crescendo. The first and third movements are written from the perspective of a parent who has lost a child, and the second movement from that of a child separated from a parent.
I remember finding my dad often lying on our blue and white striped couch in our living room at the house on Christopher Street, in the dark, listening to Górecki on the stereo, as loud as possible. My mom’s overgrown plants cast shadows across the room. I knew better than to bother my dad in that state. As a teenager, I thought it was weird. I found out after I went off to college that my dad had hepatitis C. I remember crying at the news in Pete’s tiny dorm room. I thought that I was going to lose my father. But a year after the diagnosis, Dr. Curry told my dad that his blood test came back negative. He no longer had hepatitis C, a disease with no cure, at the time. I think that listening to The Symphony of Sorrows healed his body and soul through the deep prayer and meditation it cultivated.
Górecki died on November 12, 2010. Somehow I remember reading in The Washington Post last year that Stern also died. He is in fact still alive at 87, and it was another poet who had visited Washington College, Ruth Stone, who had actually died in 2011. Stern. Stone. I’m not sure what Mr. Stern thought about some young college girl listening to such moody music, or if he knew that the darkness in her was darker than even she knew at the time.
When the tape ended, I popped in some Bob Dylan, because all poets love Bob Dylan? Maybe I was trying to bridge the age gap between us. I grew up listening to Highway 61 Revisited on Saturday mornings at home with my family around the breakfast table. As a child, I thought Dylan was children’s music, hearing the songs from Slow Train Coming in the tape deck of the family Volvo station wagon on the way to soccer practice. “Man gave names to all the animals/in the beginning, a long time ago.” I don’t know what Gerald Stern’s thoughts were on Dylan, but I felt somehow that I must have impressed him, what with my Górecki and my Dylan.
I drove along the Maryland roads that I had visited and revisited, watching the cornfields go by. I think the sun was shining; it was early in the morning. I know this because when we—Pete and I—went to pick up Gerald Stern, he and Bob Mooney were still eating breakfast with the Mooney family outside on their deck. Bananas. Gerald Stern pretended to shoot at me with his banana when I refused one. I said I wasn’t hungry, even though the truth is that I just don’t like bananas. Stern then joked that I was fat and said that I was so fat that I should eat something before I wasted away. “You must weigh 200 pounds,” he said. The fact is that I weighed 117 and my dad commented that I was turning into Kate Moss, I was so thin.
We kept on driving and I commented on Stern’s wonderful poem I Remember Galileo when I saw a dead animal—I don’t remember what kind—lying on the side of the road. There was an especially large amount of roadkill that morning; I think it had been prepared just for us so that we would have something to talk about. Roadkill. Dylan. Górecki. Bananas.
Ever since that day, whenever I see a dead animal on the side of the road, I think about Gerald Stern. He didn’t say anything profound, or give me advice about writing. But ten years after that trip to the train station, I somehow remembered the squirrel dying at the end of the poem, what with his “yellow teeth ground down to dust,” but the truth is that the squirrel lived. The squirrel is still alive. I opened my signed copy of This Time, with I Remember Galileo dog-eared. Rereading the poem all those years later gave me a sense of immense hope. It was like finding a clue that I had left for myself a decade ago, for a time when I needed it most. Somehow, it mattered that the squirrel finished “his wild dash across the highway.”
Now, it is September again, and I am attempting to write after a few years of silence. I still listen to Highway 61 Revisited on Saturday mornings, and tonight I put on The Symphony of Sorrows for my husband, Andrew, to listen to for the first time. I still don’t like bananas. But, oh, the joy! The squirrel is still alive.
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.- Gerald Stern