"Lucky Life" by Gerald Stern
On lying between the blows
Lucky Life Lucky life isn't one long string of horrors and there are moments of peace, and pleasure, as I lie in between the blows. Lucky I don't have to wake up in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, on the hill overlooking Union Square or the hill overlooking Kuebler Brewery or the hill overlooking SS. Philip and James but have my own hills and my own vistas to come back to. Each year I go down to the island I add one more year to the darkness; and though I sit up with my dear friends trying to separate the one year from the other, this one from the last, that one from the former, another from another, after a while they all get lumped together, the year we walked to Holgate, the year our shoes got washed away, the year it rained, the year my tooth brought misery to us all. This year was a crisis. I knew it when we pulled the car onto the sand and looked for the key. I knew it when we walked up the outside steps and opened the hot icebox and began the struggle with swollen drawers and I knew it when we laid out the sheets and separated the clothes into piles and I knew it when we made our first rush onto the beach and I knew it when we finally sat on the porch with coffee cups shaking in our hands. My dream is I'm walking through Phillipsburg, New Jersey, and I'm lost on South Main Street. I am trying to tell, by memory, which statue of Christopher Columbus I have to look for, the one with him slumped over and lost in weariness or the one with him vaguely guiding the way with a cross and globe in one hand and a compass in the other. My dream is I'm in the Eagle Hotel on Chamber Street sitting at the oak bar, listening to two obese veterans discussing Hawaii in 1942, and reading the funny sign over the bottles. My dream is I sleep upstairs over the honey locust and sit on the side porch overlooking the stone culvert with a whole new set of friends, mostly old and humourless. Dear waves, what will you do for me this year? Will you drown out my scream? Will you let me rise through the fog? Will you fill me with that old salt feeling? Will you let me take my long steps in the cold sand? Will you let me lie on the white bedspread and study the black clouds with the blue holes in them? Will you let me see the rusty trees and the old monoplanes one more year? Will you still let me draw my sacred figures and move the kites and the birds around with my dark mind? Lucky life is like this. Lucky there is an ocean to come to. Lucky you can judge yourself in this water. Lucky you can be purified over and over again. Lucky there is the same cleanliness for everyone. Lucky life is like that. Lucky life. Oh lucky life. Oh lucky lucky life. Lucky life. —Gerald Stern from Lucky Life (Houghton Mifflin, 1977), reprinted in This Time: New and Selected Poems (Norton, 1998)
When the disembodied voice of Philip Levine comes to you in a desperate hour, Gerald Stern can’t be far behind. During my recent hospitalization I discovered my personal essential-texts test might be: Would I want this with me in the hospital? John Irving’s latest novel? I brought it to the ER, knowing I’d have a long wait to be admitted, and promptly regretted it; it remained unreadable even after I was discharged. This Time, Gerald Stern’s 1998 new and selected, which I bought at the Dodge Poetry Festival in September 2000? Twenty-five years later I asked for this book to be brought to me, on day seven of nineteen, as I underwent urgent radiotherapy for what pathology would eventually determine to be a rare recurrence of the rare cancer, a type of sarcoma, I was first treated for in 2011.
That day I was feeling, oddly, lucky, amid the whirlwind that had begun with a clinic visit on a Saturday morning for the seemingly innocuous sluggishness and what I took to be sinus issues that had lingered on after Covid and flu vaccinations and abruptly became suspected recurrence. I first had it in my leg, and was treated with radiotherapy and surgical resection that left a long scar down my left hip and took a healthy margin from several muscles: lateral hamstring, quad, glute medias. I went on to race bicycles and hike arduous distances and hit a one-rep deadlift max of 245 pounds. Too, to train for and run my first half marathon, just this past October, and so it remains difficult to get my head around the idea that I have two large tumours in my lungs, and that one is involved with my heart and my superior vena cava.1
I don’t particularly want this to become a cancer newsletter. I’ve never written about my health despite various concerns thereabout being a continuous presence I mostly manage to forget about; I suppose I have found it uninteresting to anyone but me, and often uninteresting even to me, its captive audience. But I do believe that we keep poetry alive—and perhaps it keeps us alive—when we are reading and responding to it with our whole selves. When we are open to, and about, the truth of our lives, we are able to receive the truth of poems. So there’s no real way to tell you why “Lucky Life” came back to me, what it means to me now, without the context: I was in the hospital, adrift on a sea of uncertainty, and thinking of what was certain, of that which I have rarely, if ever doubted: my friends, the cavalry of happy warriors I reached out to with the news and who reached out to me with their best and most hilarious idiocy and cat pictures and funny books and treats and sticky-limbed ninjas that, when flung against a wall, climb down with a herky-jerky unpredictably, much to the delight of both humans and felines.2
What’s to love about this poem? With Stern, for me, it’s always his combination of unassuming speaker and powerfully controlled rhetoric. Here these two collide to enact the central tension between the profane—or perhaps simply quotidian—personal and the sacred oracular, a transcendental style that combines, oddly, Walt Whitman and hebraic tradition. I don’t know enough about the latter to speak with any expertise; I do know Stern has often been compared to Uncle Walt; I understand this to be an odd juxtaposition.
I see, and hear, in this collision the epitome of Stern’s vision and style, perhaps best embodied in the phrase “lucky life.” As title, it presents as a simple construction, adjective + noun. One enters the poem with the impression that the its subject will be a life the poet considers lucky, and quickly finds the construction is far more complex, the opening sentence a curtailed declaration, a phrase that begs for a subject and a helping verb, and in my reading, the missing language is You are: “[You are] lucky life isn’t one long string of horrors.” Stern, ever forthcoming, makes himself the subject in line two, and continues with a comic catalogue of gratitude via negative: at least he’s not in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, looking down on both that town and the one immediately adjacent: Easton, Pennsylvania, on the other side of the Delaware River, which splits Jersey from PA.3
The poem proceeds in this manner, alternating between the quotidian details that make up any life and the profound meaning Stern finds in them: the shared memories that constitute the entire world of one’s relationships with their beloveds and the idiosyncratic strangeness of one’s dream life meeting his address to the waves, to the blows with which each of us inevitably meets, and the decision to answer his impossible questions with certainty. With praise, with gratitude, with hope.
Lucky life? Lucky I went to that clinic, a thing the average Canadian does when they feel unwell, a habit I had to consciously cultivate after growing up un- and underinsured in the US, a status that teaches one a strange economics of health. Lucky I got those vaccines, which I can’t help but think exacerbated what was already there enough for it to show itself: I’d been entirely asymptomatic and was unknowingly in real danger. Lucky to live ten minutes from a good hospital, where doctors and nurses and technicians and porters and dietary aides and custodians somehow maintain their professionalism and compassion every day of the year, including Christmas and New Year’s and especially your birthday, if you’re there that day, as I was, on January 5. Lucky radiation therapists will come in on Christmas morning to ensure critical treatments are administered.
Lucky to be four hours by train from an internationally-recognized clinic specializing in your very weird disease, to have a consult with a doctor who is an expert in your very weird type of very weird disease, to be getting chemo less than four hours later, the first of six planned treatments intended to get control of the disease and learn what else might be possible.
Lucky to be here, typing this: for a few days, I wasn’t sure I’d leave that first hospital room.
Lucky I removed myself last year from a situation that had became more stressful that I could manage, and along the way jettisoned virtually every nagging should and could and would that did not serve what I have come to understand are my core values, the things that have given my life meaning, and lucky to have those convictions to guide me through the new shape of my days. Lucky all of it led me here, mucking around in poems that stayed with me through the many years when I felt I did not deserve them. Lucky they never left, that they’ve come pouring back when I need them most.
Lucky to remember, suddenly this morning, running down a terrifically steep sand dune somewhere in Massachusetts with Michael, July of 2001, and throwing ourselves into the clear black Atlantic waves, astounded by the cold. We gasped, and laughed, and dove under the crests only to come up in a trough about to be pummelled from above. In between, a wild joy. Lucky life is like that. Lucky life. Oh, lucky life. Oh lucky lucky life. Lucky life.
Poetry belongs to its public, so A Momentary Stay will always be free. If you’d like to support this project, you can send a one-time tip or a recurring donation on Ko-fi.
Alternatively! There’s nothing I like more than hearing that a poem you read here did something for you, or that you forwarded it to a friend or read it out loud to someone you love: I can’t trade that for coffee, but it also keeps me going.
If there is a record to be held for such a feat, I would like to submit my time for consideration.
I’m glad my ribs stopped hurting, because they generated a tremendous amount of laughter.
One very special reader of this publication understands how delighted I was to rediscover this act of petty interstate rivalry. (And I had forgotten that Stern was born in Pittsburgh!)
Wishing you well on your treatments. I've always appreciated your thoughts on poetry and the occasional poem of your own that you've posted.
Thank you for introducing me to a poet I’d never heard of before but will now be checking out—his language is so wry and clear and beautiful…”black clouds with the blue holes in them”….