Amy Gerstler / Two Poems

TWO POEMS

by Amy Gerstler

Bon Courage

Why are the woods so alluring? A forest appears

to a young girl one morning as she combs

the dreams out of   her hair. The trees rustle

and whisper, shimmer and hiss. The forest

opens and closes, a door loose on its hinges,

banging in a strong wind. Everything in the dim

kitchen: the basin, the jug, the skillet, the churn,

snickers scornfully. In this way a maiden

is driven toward the dangers of a forest,

but the forest is our subject, not this young girl.

She’s glad to lie down with trees towering all around.

A certain euphoria sets in. She feels molecular,

bedeviled, senses someone gently pulling her hair,

tingles with kisses she won’t receive for years.

Three felled trees, a sort of chorus, narrate

her thoughts, or rather channel theirs through her,

or rather subject her to their peculiar verbal

restlessness ...    our deepening need for non-being intones

the largest and most decayed tree, mid-sentence.

I’m not one of you squeaks the shattered sapling,

blackened by lightning. Their words become metallic

spangles shivering the air. Will I forget the way home?

the third blurts. Why do I feel like I’m hiding in a giant’s nostril?

the oldest prone pine wants to know. Are we being   freed

from matter? the sapling asks. Insects are well-intentioned,

offers the third tree, by way of consolation. Will it grow

impossible to think a thought through to its end? gasps the sapling,

adding in a panicky voice, I’m becoming spongy! The girl

feels her hands attach to some distant body. She rises

to leave, relieved these trees are not talking about her.

Source: Poetry (March 2013).

Hoffnung

He fancies his chances are good with her,

unaware that in the years since the war

she has come to prefer women whose cunts

taste like mustard. To pin one’s hopes on

a bark-colored moth, its wings crinkled

like crepe paper, a moth affixed high

on the kitchen wall, frozen for days where

it will likely die in noble clinging mode

just under the cobwebby heating vent,

is to confirm your need for more friends

and a greater daily quota of sunlight.

To raise C.’s hopes that T. can stop

drinking and then to liken those

hopes to fields of undulating grain,

alfalfa perhaps, is to wish C. hip deep

in acres of unscythed denial. The blind

typist hopes she’ll be hired tonight without

her disability becoming an issue. L. said he felt

hope’s rhizomes race throughout his body,

radiating in all directions, like some incipient

disease he’d been fighting since childhood.

Hope, he said, it’s as insidious as bitterness.

If mother earth only knew how much we

loved one another she would creak, shudder,

and split like a macheted melon, releasing

the fiery ball of molten hope at her core.

Source: Poetry (March 2013).

Read also
BIOGRAPHY OF AMY GERSTLER

Amy Gerstler / In Perpetual Spring

In Perpetual Spring

by Amy Gerstler

Gardens are also good places

to sulk. You pass beds of

spiky voodoo lilies   

and trip over the roots   

of a sweet gum tree,   

in search of medieval   

plants whose leaves,   

when they drop off   

turn into birds

if they fall on land,

and colored carp if they   

plop into water.

Suddenly the archetypal   

human desire for peace   

with every other species   

wells up in you. The lion   

and the lamb cuddling up.

The snake and the snail, kissing.

Even the prick of the thistle,   

queen of the weeds, revives   

your secret belief

in perpetual spring,

your faith that for every hurt   

there is a leaf to cure it.

Amy Gerstler
Bitter Angel 
New York: North Point Press, 1990



Read also
Biography of Amy Gerstler

Reb Livingston Reveals Her Poetry Crush / Amy Gerstler

Amy Gerstler

Reb Livingston Reveals Her Poetry Crush

“Poets on Poets” is another new essay series, parallel to the recently launched “Selling Shorts,” only this time, as you’ve probably guessed, I’ve invited poets to talk about their favorite poets. I decided to start with Reb Livingston because she’s a good friend; we’ve done several panels together in the Virginia-Maryland area, and she’s currently celebrating the publication of The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel, a selection of poetry from No Tell Motel, the online poetry journal she co-edits with Molly Arden (and where, as it happens, she’s had the opportunity to publish the poet she’s chosen to write about).

Amy Gerstler is my first poet crush. I don’t say “was” because it’s been almost a decade since I first fell for her and I still go all googly for her poems just like I did the first time. It was 1997, I recently discovered a website called Amazon and suddenly had access to an amazing selection of poetry books that I could browse from my office desk as my boss believed I was hard at work. I ordered with wild abandon, anything that sounded interesting. One of those books was a reprint from Carnegie Mellon’s Classic Contemporary series called Bitter Angel. Gerstler had me at the first line of the first poem, “Siren”:

I have a fish’s tail, so I’m not qualified to love you.

And then she had me again and again and again. A quick glance at the poems, they seemed harmless enough, but no, they were entrancing, haunting and daring. They never left my mind. Devotion to Gerstler’s work ensued. Her books are challenging to describe, especially in such a brief essay, because doing so rings a string of contradictions, her poems are funny, but not jokey, smart, but not showy, hopeful, yet cynical, knowing and full of doubt, bold and tender, strong and vulnerable. She is a master at many things, such as taking the point of view of an unconventional character and not only making the reader feel like she’s really in that character’s mind, but with great empathy. Or how Gerstler skillfully invokes a mystery, painstakingly examines and meditates on it, but humbly defers to solve it.

She points out the questions, lays out the facts and scenes, examines possibilities, directions, but never cheapens the moment with a neatly packaged conclusion. I’ve always thought that poets offering up the “great answer to life”—oh if only, dear reader, you were clever enough to figure it out from the clues in the lines—were actually presenting an age-old parlor trick. My contention is that the greatest gift a poet has to offer is leading readers to new ways of perceiving something, asking the questions we never even thought to ask, reminding us there are other ways, so many other ways, let us not be so sure what we think we know and how we see it—we can never be sure, situations and people are always complicated and yes, there are hidden meanings in everything, but let’s not confuse those with pat and dry answers. If you demand answers, try a crossword puzzle.

Gerstler’s themes and images (birds, dolls, incestuous kissing siblings, ghosts, mediums, brides) stretch throughout her eight-book career. It’s not this book was about “that” and the next book focused on “this”—each book builds on the previous ones, ruminating on ways the dead and living co-exist, steeped in literary and biblical history while addressing contemporary culture. Difficult topics to grasp and write about, yet she does so with fierce focus and dedication.

It’s not that Gerstler has been completely overlooked, while still mid-career, she received a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1991 as well as a number of other prizes and her last four books, from Nerve Storm(1993) to Ghost Girl (2004), have been published by Penguin. But for a poet who has already created such an important body of work and will no doubt do so for decades to come, there’s no good reason why her poetry is not better known, read and discussed more thoroughly. If you’re looking for fascinating, multi-faceted and exquisite poems, look no farther. Sure, I won’t lie, I’ve had other poet crushes and will no doubt indulge in more down the road, but never have I felt one for so long and so deeply.

http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2006/02/15/reb-livingston-on-poets/#more-929

Read also

BIOGRAPHY OF AMY GERSTLER