Editor’s note: In this week’s Poetry Corner, we connect with poet Dan Gerber who is a novelist, short story writer and poet. His book, “A Primer on Parallel Lives” will be published this year by Copper Canyon Press. It is Gerber’s seventh book of poems. He lives in the Santa Ynez Valley, in California.
Sometimes, good teaching doesn’t feel like teaching at all. It may be as ‘simple’ as reminding us, gently, of what we already know. Dan Gerber’s poem, “The Changes In Santa Ynez,” is a catalyst for reacquainting us with ourselves.
The Changes In Santa Ynez
Through the last long weeks of summer
I waited for fall,
though you’d hardly know it,
so subtle here,
a tinge in the vineyards,
stately old tarantula crossing the road
on his way to die for love.
Now it’s come, and I’m hardly aware,
a paler blue in the sky,
the blanket I pull up
from the foot of the bed at three a.m.,
the familiar books of longing I turn to,
the rustle of leaves I’ve walked through before.
It is easy to forget our interdependency with others and with inanimate entities. The title poem of Dan Gerber’s book reminds us, gently, not just to pay attention, but about the very things and conditions that are required for us to do so. As it closes, “A Primer on Parallel Lives” offers a new twist on an old idea.
A Primer on Parallel Lives
Bees and sprinklers employ the silence,
and a horse screaming over the hill.
According to Euclid, Hades has no depth,
no echoes, no valleys, no heart’s embrace.
Now the faintest curve of a sycamore
begins to shine through the fog,
and the window we look out of
becomes the frame in which we’re displayed.
‘Political’ poems are notoriously difficult to write. Finding a tone that refuses to preach, but does not surrender its message, even its fervency, is a challenge. Dan Gerber more than meets that challenge in his poem “2004.”
2004
When your country has been a bad citizen again
and you’re a little ashamed of her,
as you were of your four-year-old
when she threw another tantrum at the mall,
and you wanted to pretend you didn’t know her,
that you weren’t responsible for her bad behavior,
a citizen of the world, as you wish she would be.
Still her mountains glow in the late evening sun,
and your neighbors, who voted to support her arrogance,
smile kindly when you greet them, and you’re moved,
observing their obvious affection for each other,
how he pulls up her collar against the chill breeze
and she smooths back his comb-over again and again.
You saw this in Cincinnati and again in Darfur,
people being conscious and considerate of others,
and you wonder how we ever draw the line
about whom we choose to comfort and whom
it might be quite permissible to kill.
It’s said that good things often come in small packages. This poem is funny, smart, sexy
and small.
Madam Wei Remembers
aka Wei Wan ca. 1050
How we both looked down
to where you disappeared inside me.
I lifted my head from the pillow to watch
that mysterious dark child come between us.
This poem examines intention and generosity with self-deprecating humor. And it leaves us wondering about the pronoun in the last line.
Bodhisattva
When the young man on State Street
approached as if to ask directions,
saying, ”Can you help me out a little here?”
and I, though I already knew, said,
“Help you out how, exactly?”
“A dollar or two if you can,”
he said, and I took a deep breath,
holding in what I might’ve held out,
hearing When someone asks, you
give what you can, from my bank
of training in the ways of compassion,
and though I didn’t want to,
opened my wallet, and
with the munificence of a toad,
pulled out a five and bought him off.
Possession may be nine-tenths of the law, but who possesses what in this poem about dogs’ best friends, and their assumptions?
Late Summer
Two Mongrels, one mostly shepherd, one chow,
wandered up each day from the canyon
while we worked on the barn.
They didn’t seem to be hungry,
asked nothing from us,
and slept all day in the shade of the walls
on the cool loam
of the not-yet-fenced-in corral.
They lived somewhere to the north
was all we knew, or assumed,
since the canyon was north,
and they, for their part, assumed nothing,
only that our land was theirs to warm with their bellies
and that we were welcome to it
while we nailed the roof beams in place.
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