Kissing Stieglitz Good-Bye

Every city in America is approached

through a work of art, usually a bridge

but sometimes a road that curves underneath

or drops down from the sky. Pittsburgh has a tunnel—

you don’t know it—that takes you through the rivers

and under the burning hills. I went there to cry

in the woods or carry my heavy bicycle

through fire and flood. Some have little parks—

San Francisco has a park. Albuquerque

is beautiful from a distance; it is purple

at five in the evening. New York is Egyptian,

especially from the little rise on the hill

at 14-C; it has twelve entrances

like the body of Jesus, and Easton, where I lived,

has two small floating bridges in front of it

that brought me in and out. I said good-bye

to them both when I was 57. I’m reading

Joseph Wood Krutch again—the second time.

I love how he lived in the desert. I’m looking at the skull

of Georgia O’Keeffe. I’m kissing Stieglitz good-bye.

He was a city, Stieglitz was truly a city

in every sense of the word; he wore a library

across his chest; he had a church on his knees.

I’m kissing him good-bye; he was, for me,

the last true city; after him there were

only overpasses and shopping centers,

little enclaves here and there, a skyscraper

with nothing near it, maybe a meaningless turf

where whores couldn’t even walk, where nobody sits,

where nobody either lies or runs; either that

or some pure desert: a lizard under a boojum,

a flower sucking the water out of a rock.

What is the life of sadness worth, the bookstores

lost, the drugstores buried, a man with a stick

turning the bricks up, numbering the shards,

dream twenty-one, dream twenty-two. I left

with a glass of tears, a little artistic vial.

I put it in my leather pockets next

to my flask of Scotch, my golden knife and my keys,

my joyful poems and my T-shirts. Stieglitz is there

beside his famous number; there is smoke

and fire above his head; some bowlegged painter

is whispering in his ear; some lady-in-waiting

is taking down his words. I’m kissing Stieglitz

good-bye, my arms are wrapped around him, his photos

are making me cry; we’re walking down Fifth Avenue;

we’re looking for a pencil; there is a girl

standing against the wall—I’m shaking now

when I think of her; there are two buildings, one

is in blackness, there is a dying poplar;

there is a light on the meadow; there is a man

on a sagging porch. I would have believed in everything.

Copyright Credit: Gerald Stern, “Kissing Stieglitz Good-Bye” from This Time: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 1998 by Gerald Stern. Reprinted with the permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. This selection may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Source: This Time: New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1998)