Stern Country
By Gerald Stern
For sleeplessness, your head face down, your shoulder blades
floating and aspirin as a last resort, when
death is threatening, though lately I have experimented
with numbers and as for dreams I've never been boring
and only once did I bite the arm of a woman
sitting next to me and I should be careful,
she might have a hand-written poem or a memoir
and didn't I bite her arm and aren't we both
poets, though I warn her that I make gurgling
noises and twitch in both legs and make the bed
jump and I am exhausted from looking at poems
and I don't care about her nuts and bolts
and she has to go to the wilderness herself
and fuck the exercises, let her get smashed
by a Mack truck, then she'll be ready to mourn.
Gerald Stern, "Stern Country" from Everything is Burning. Copyright © 2005 by Gerald Stern. Used by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Source:
Everything is Burning
(W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2005)
