Tuesday Poem, "Men," by Bert Stern

Men

Kenny's bad boy's across the street,

washing his car, a black Camarro

with V8 engine, white letter

tires, and Holly carbs,

just like his dad's.

Sundays, they both drive out

to car shows, but my show's

just out the window, where the cars

lie dreaming like black cats.

Around here, people are

their cars, even the heap

another father and son lie under

in their driveway chop shop

next door to Kenny's.

As for Angie, the kid

washing his Camarro, I know

his dirty little secrets. I saw him

on the avenue yesterday, outside

his car, laid back against the burnished

hood, telling a brown-skinned girl

to get in. Instead, she tossed

her black hair and walked away,

he still yelling as she moved

fast down the street, already

half a block away. For a moment

he froze in wrathful astonishment,

then, like a flash, his u-turn

trails stink of burnt rubber.

I saw him catch her, drag her in

almost before she could scream,

and they're off to where I don't

want to think about.

I know there's karma somewhere,

but across the street, as Angie wipes

a chamois over the car's flanks, his face

is open and innocent as a child's.

Watching him, I shake my head.

Maybe he'll get better as years

press down on him. Or maybe,

just now, he's touched as I am

by the clear sky of Mary's blue

hanging over us, as if to soothe

our frayed angers and heal

the bruised heart of the girl,

naked, defenseless against us.

by Bert Stern

from his book, Steerage

published by Ibbetson Street Press

Bert is Milligan Professor Emeritus at Wabash College and chief editor, retired, at Hilton Publishing. He and his wife, Tam Lin Neville, co-edit a small press that publishes books by poets over sixty. He also teaches at a program in Boston for people on probation.

He has a long list of credits, reviews and poems which have been published. His critical study, Wallace Stevens: Art of Uncertainty, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 1965.

Steerage, his first book of poems, may be purchased from Ibbetson Press.

In my most vague and peculiar way, I've been trying, without doing much of anything, to get in contact with Bert Stern. Of course, a friend had left his e-mail in my e-mail box a month ago, but I didn't notice. Finally, I did it and he's given me permission to use his work which I will do for the next few weeks on Tuesday Poem.

Bert is a most charming and gregarious man, often to be found at the Bagel Bard's meeting place at Au Bon Pain in Somerville on Saturday mornings. I hope to see him there this week.

Synchronicity

The Dishwasher's wife/beloved/partner mentioned synchronicity in one of her blogs around Thanksgiving. And that started me thinking about how my father discovered his unconscious when he was somewhere around seventy.

In his younger years, when he'd unfortunately been left to raise me, his main preoccupations were tumblers of scotch, martinis and ignoring conventions. He had sound arguments about why most everything was arbitrary including letters of the alphabet (I'm sure I absorbed that when I was around eight, long before my mother died, along with the fact that religions were designed to organize and confine and hardly to be trusted, much less depended upon.) Ceremonies like funerals and graduations were foolish. Novels were allowable, though non-fiction was preferable (and not to be trusted.) Poetry and philosophy were fluff, to be ignored. And, though he considered Darwin and Freud, admirable because of their formative and original thinking, the unconscious was of no concern, much less influential in daily life.

But by the time he became an excellent grandfather to my daughter, he'd begun to think about the importance of dreams, to write his down, had read a bit of Freud and Jung, and discovered The Tao of Synchronicity, a small paperback which he gave to Krissy. She believes in synchronicity, just as she believes in a diet of joy. And she still has that worn paperback, held together by a rubber band that her grandfather gave her.

This last Saturday at the Bagel Bards, I sat talking with Bert Stern, who gave me his new book of poems, Steerage. Somehow the name Taylor Stoehr and a program of teaching probationers about reading and writing came up. It turns out that Bert has been working in it with Taylor who became his first really good male friend in Boston.

A few weeks ago, a student in my class was reading while he waited for his film to dry. Noticing that the Xerox was of prison diaries, I asked who was teaching a course like that. He described this rather unassuming man with whom he's taken two courses. Taylor Stoehr. I hadn't known of anyone else in the University who was actually volunteering to work with such disenfranchised people. (Most of the more radical teachers are in the College of Public and Community Service, not in what was once the College of Arts and Sciences.)

I e-mailed Taylor Stoehr that afternoon and we met a week later. What I really liked about him is that he has no expectations about what the classes 'will do to improve' the probationers lives. He recognizes that most probably won't change all that much, except for the knowledge that they've had something like eight weeks talking in small groups, reading Fredrick Douglass' writing, written some themselves, and begun to build up some sense of trust in each other that naturally led to expressing difficult feelings and ideas. And they participated in an ending ceremony that acknowledged what they had achieved -- experienced -- though it might not be quantifiable.

This morning, after I took a page for xerox to the Department, I ran into Taylor heading toward his class. We talked a minute and he mentioned that Bert Stern told him that he knew me. And I said that Bert told me he was inheriting Taylor's copy of the syllabus for the prison diary course and I asked him for extras.

Today I will begin to read Bert's book.