Someone to Watch Over Me
It is not knowing what a mulberry sidewalk looks like
in the first place that will start you up sliding, then dancing,
though if it weren’t for my bird-like interior and how I shake
one foot then the other I would not have seen the encroachment
myself; and if it weren’t for the squirrel who lives in pure greed
and balances whatever he touches with one hand then another
I would have picked the berries up one berry at a time
and laid them out to dry beside my crinkled lily and my pink daisy.
In this decade I am taking care of the things I love. I’m
sorting everything out starting, if I have to, with the
smallest blossom, the smallest, say, salmon-colored petunia.
I’m eating slowly, dipping one crumb at a time in my beer,
and singing—as I never did before—one word at a time
in my true voice, which is after all a quiet second tenor
that came upon me after my first descent into manhood
and after a disgrace involving my seventh grade music teacher
and a sudden growth of hair. If it weren’t for my large lips
I could have played the French horn. If I didn’t like mulberries—
one among a million, I know, and eat them—without sugar—
the way a grackle does his from the downtrodden branches
I wouldn’t be standing on a broken chair, and I wouldn’t be shaking;
and if I didn’t slide from place to place and walk
with a toothbrush in my pocket and touch one bush
for belief and one for just beauty I wouldn’t be singing.
from Last Blue (Norton, 1998)
In his final book of essays, Death Watch, written almost twenty years after this poem was first published, Gerald Stern asks: “And what was I? A little dust that sang too much?”
That question, coupled with today’s poem, is such a testament to what I love about Stern’s poetry, which is the way in which it offers a sweetness, a tiny tenderness, a little reflective joy. I think of him as a poet of sweetness. Today’s poem makes me think of a poem, “Rose of Sharon,” by another poet of sweetness, Brigit Pegeen Kelly. Embedded in that poem is this litany:
Pink flowers floating on water.
The flushed blossoms themselves like water.
Rising. Falling. The wind kicking up skeins
Of scented foam. High-kicking waves. Or laughing
Dancers. O silly thoughts. But a great sweetness….
And then it was over.
I love that quick, sudden, in-line volta, where Kelly moves from “O silly thoughts” to “But a great sweetness.” There’s such a validation of the silliness, the joy. Stern does the same thing in today’s poem.
Validation of joy, silliness, dancing, beauty, and wonder is at heart of this poem today. Notice how it begins — not with knowing, but with “not knowing.” That move, so small, on Stern’s part, allows the poem to be set up as this system of equations, this balancing act between expectation and reality. It is “not knowing” that allows for “dancing.” It is the speaker’s “bird-like interior” that allows for the misstep, the shaking that leads to the joy of seeing the mulberries.
I well up internally during the opening lines of this poem because of how it notices without judgement. Even the squirrel in his “pure greed” is described so aptly that it renders the animal beautiful, almost adorable in his state of trying-to-hold-so-much. And the mulberry tree itself is such an apt image for the poem, as well. If you’ve ever seen a mulberry tree, you can sense the way it hangs all fruity over this poem (and makes me think of Stern’s friend Ross Gay, and his tree-laden poem “To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian”). And you can probably see the berries on the sidewalk, speckled and splattered, and the roots of the tree pushing out of the cracks, angling the street upward, making little hills out of what was once paved flat.
So much of that opening detail, that act of noticing and validation and sense-making, is made beautiful with a single line that follows:
In this decade I am taking care of the things I love.
This is one of those stop-in-your-seat-even-though-you’re-already-still kinds of lines. The craft of its beauty is in the way Stern just sort of sits it inside all of this small and gracious noticing. It turns on the everydayness of the line that comes before, the “crinkled lily” and “pink daisy,” and it turns into even more everydayness, into the “smallest blossom.” By sitting there, in between these small, tender things that are held, it feels true, doesn’t it? We see Stern’s speaker placing the berries beside the flowers. We see him wanting. We see him starting small. Just as this poem serves as a validation of joy, perhaps it also serves as a lesson in how to take care. Start small. Eat slow. Sing, in your “quiet second tenor.”
I think often about what it means for a poem to revel in the slow moment, to resist urgency, particularly now, in a moment — endless, constant, not just one moment, but a long string of continued history — that feels tense with urgency and the consequences of such urgency. If Stern’s speaker here is anything like him — in his 70s at the time of writing this — notice how long it took him to come to that sentence: “In this decade I am taking care of the things I love.” I think of my own father, who turns 76 in two months and has said with a small chuckle that he will probably die working, and what it might mean for him, smaller than he once was, and grayer, to balance on a wobbly chair and pick berries. How I have never considered such an image until now. And how the consideration of such an image moves me almost to tears. Isn’t that something a poem can do? To remind us of what it might mean to slow down, not within the realm of some sort of capitalist paradigm, but outside of it, where the imagination has never gone?
And isn’t a poem also a place to remind us of what care looks like? And how care, perhaps, can contain both joy and sorrow, like Stern’s speaker returning to his quiet tenor voice despite “disgrace,” despite his “descent into manhood?” Or how the chair itself that Stern’s speaker is standing on is “broken,” and how he is “shaking,” which calls back the opening lines, and his “bird-like interior?” And how, right at the end, we see the way he needs to touch one bush “for belief” and another “for beauty,” and the way that shows us an almost child-like trepidation that borders on wonder, this need for reassurance before the leap? The hand outstretched like a child on a diving board. The way it probably reaches out so gently, just to know that what it is about to touch won’t bite, or simply is there.
When I consider this poem, I ask myself: what is the product of our current urgency? What is the product of our capitalistic labor? What is the product of our time? In what ways does our obsession with product obscure our vision to what is seen as less than product, as a given, as something not worth joy, not worth celebration, and, perhaps more importantly, not worth the complication that comes with joy? Here, we have an example of a poem that manifests a singular culture of care. Despite so much, despite descent, despite disgrace, there is a person here who is attempting to hold, to slow down, to sing one word at a time. Perhaps this is a poem because in no way does it represent a public reality. Perhaps this is a poem because it in every way represents so many of our private realities. Oh, if only we could make the long walk at evening a kind of beautiful public reality.
This poem repeats “if” constantly, but it is with a kindness and a gentleness that resists the possibility of saying if it happened this way, then this is what could have been. Rather, the poem still begins and ends with how it is. With truth. And so the if functions almost as a way for the speaker to remind himself of all the ways — some terrible, some full of joy — that the world has conspired to put him here, on this broken chair, reaching for berries. Stern gestures at these things with, I imagine, a slyness, a smile, as if to say both sorrow and joy led me here. The need for reassurance and the need for beauty.
A more well known poem by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, “Song,” ends with the lines:
This song
Is sweet. It is sweet. The heart dies of this sweetness.
Though Stern’s poem does not do the same work as Kelly’s — the act of placing cruelty alongside tenderness — it does end with song. And that song is almost certainly sweet, just as it is probably a little off-key, a little broken, a little wobbly.
The point, I think, is that, regardless, it is being sung.