Read Genesis
I was betrayed by Bohemia early
in my life and left a run-down hotel
with my eye swollen shut by an insect bite
but got my revenge in France and Italy
and wasn’t bitten once in those two countries.
I swore off free meals and book-stealing
both there and elsewhere and
if I got something for nothing
it wasn’t by schnorring
so have a heart, pedagogus.
Think of Baudelaire and his clouds
or Michelangelo on his step ladder
putting a little spit in for tone
and a gob or two for substance
just to please the flunkies down there
even as they kicked the wooden legs
their tongues out in excitement
though I have to interrupt to say
God did it with a voice not a finger,
n’est-ce pas?
Copyright © 2016 by Gerald Stern. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 30, 2016, by the Academy of American Poets.
“The poem, which has an internal and musical logic, considers two things, Bohemia—good and bad—and the artist in his act. There is a turn, almost as if in a sonnet, in the eleventh line, which begins the second half of the poem; it is Michelangelo at his ceiling, and the Papal flunkies below, kicking the step ladder. But God communicated with her voice, not with her finger, as in Michelangelo (and Yeats).”
—Gerald Stern
Gerald Stern
Gerald Stern was born in Pittsburgh on February 22, 1925. His recent books of poetry include the posthumous collection Blessed as We Were Late Selected and New Poems, 2000–2018 (W. W. Norton, 2023); Galaxy Love (W. W. Norton, 2017); Divine Nothingness (W. W. Norton, 2014); In Beauty Bright (W. W. Norton, 2012); Early Collected Poems: 1965–1992 (W. W. Norton, 2010), Save the Last Dance (W. W. Norton, 2008); Everything Is Burning (W. W. 2005); American Sonnets (W. W. Norton, 2002); Last Blue: Poems (W. W.