December 2015
Michael Gessner
mjcg3@aol.com
mjcg3@aol.com
I live in Tucson with my wife Jane, a watercolorist, and with our dog, Irish. Our son Chris, writes for screen in L.A. My more recent work has appeared in The North American Review, The French Literary Review, Verse Daily, and others. FutureCycle will publish my selected poems in 2016.
Author's Note:
In discussing this poem with the publisher, the suggestion was made to offer some remarks regarding its background, and so allow me to offer the following with this qualification: the ideal work of a poem, in its brief span, is to transform. If this occurs, then the transformative experience is beyond anything that might be written or said about it, including these comments.
The central figure of the poem was based originally on the figure of Prof. Bernard Levine, a Yeats’ scholar from whom I had taken seminar courses in T. S. Eliot, and “English Romantic Writers,” while an undergraduate at Wayne State University in Detroit. Levine was a questor of those unique metaphysical aspirations found in poetry. So this poem, is if it is anything at all, is a poem about poetry and poets. It is a poem 'grounded' in an imaginary garden. It is a poem grounded in imagination.
After many revisions, during which time I was reading Pound, who also inhabited this state of ascending aspiration, and whose presence, unlike my admired teacher, is, at once recognizable, and because of this, in its debut, the poem was dedicated "In Memory of Ezra Pound." His figure, resigned to a self-imposed silence in his later years is the "Companion, talking with your hands," whose spirit-of-language has "been faithful to the world."
There are words that suggest, by association, other words, as in the first line, "were" might suggest "we are," as well, and in the last line, "gables" to suggest the reaches of human sensibility in speech.
When the poem was accepted by a publication that included many of the older, established poets of reputation, I thought it was something of a ‘breakthrough.’ That is, until I learned it would carry a poem by Charles Bukowski, “the poet laureate of L.A. lowlife,” as the L.A. Times once put it. Since I could not think of sharing pages with Bukowski—like sharing sheets—I contacted the publisher and asked to have my poem withdrawn from the issue. However, it was too late; it had gone to press and a retraction was out of the question. Whenever I recount this incident, my skin begins to itch. I want to shower.
The Tropic Gardens of St. Gallen
Were done with old dreams
sagging like vines after winter
sinew-netted the ruins
Roman or Swiss crowd the mild day
subject of impatience
spring, statues tighten
with passion flowers
like elongated hands
sought in the dark
approaching the gables
of disfigured hunters and porous fawns
above the pillars and the checked parquet
tiles of another setting the night brought
from its changing geometry
and we walked among them
as though to discover at last
what intricacy our walking would bring
to perform the great task
we imagined perfection
so we would always seek it
the gardens of language
and turned away toil spent
like the widow’s silk on the cornices at Tivoli
or the willows of Chapultepec.
Companion, talking with your hands
under the dry trellis
in your winter blanket and mountain chair,
you have been faithful to the world
to the gables
the Alpine gables
-first published in Sycamore Review
The Tropic Gardens of St. Gallen
Were done with old dreams
sagging like vines after winter
sinew-netted the ruins
Roman or Swiss crowd the mild day
subject of impatience
spring, statues tighten
with passion flowers
like elongated hands
sought in the dark
approaching the gables
of disfigured hunters and porous fawns
above the pillars and the checked parquet
tiles of another setting the night brought
from its changing geometry
and we walked among them
as though to discover at last
what intricacy our walking would bring
to perform the great task
we imagined perfection
so we would always seek it
the gardens of language
and turned away toil spent
like the widow’s silk on the cornices at Tivoli
or the willows of Chapultepec.
Companion, talking with your hands
under the dry trellis
in your winter blanket and mountain chair,
you have been faithful to the world
to the gables
the Alpine gables
-first published in Sycamore Review
©2015 Michael Gessner