The Paris Review – Poets on Sofas: Cheswayo Mphanza reads Gerald Stern

National Poetry Month is here and with it a second series of Poets on Couches. In these videograms, poets read and discuss the poems that helps them through these strange times – they send straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and the warmth of being able to speak to one another across distances.

“Leaving Another Kingdom”
by Gerald Stern
Issue No. 90 (Winter 1983)

I think this year I’ll be waiting for the white lilacs
Before I get too sad
I’ll let the daffodils go flower by flower
and the blue squill go and the primroses.
Levine will be here by then
waving fountain pens with rolled up posters
by Ike Williams and King Levinsky.
He will reach into his breast pocket
for cards of grim Toledo
shows the bars in the city center and the bus stops.
He and I together
will come on our hands and knees
on the warm floor
in the muddy roses
under the thorn tree.
We’ll go the mile to my graveyard
without a word of regret
two rich poets
go a little bit over the past
change a thing or two
make some connections,
do everything with balance,
stopping on the way to pet a wolf,
slow down at the locks,
give lectures to each other about early technology,
Mention of eels and snakes,
touch a little on our two cities,
curse our henries a little
his Ford, my Frick,
almost human, almost decent,
slide over the stones to reach the island.
Throwing spears on the way,
Stare at two robins for twenty minutes
start a life together in rural Pennsylvania,
step on a heavy tire, square and monstrous,
huge and damp, maybe a 49 Hudson,
maybe a 40 Packard, maybe a Buick
with mohair seats and silk cords
and tiny panes of glass – we both see
the same car each of us drives
our own brick street, we both whistle
the same idiotic songs that treetops fly
Houses that sail along like they did then
We’ll both go to the end of the island
so we could put our feet in the water, so could I
Show him where the stream begins so we can
Search for bottles and worn out rubbers, Trojans
full of holes the guarantee expires –
Love has gone limp and love has gone flat –
a few yards from New Jersey near the stones
it looks like big white turtles guarding the entrance
to the dangerous canal where these lovers – Tristan
and his Isolt, Troilus and you know who
came roaring past on hoses, their faces
damp with happiness, the screams and sighs
Left up the river somewhere, now her fingers
They move through the track, now they stretch out their arms
to keep yourself from falling, now in the slow part
past the turtles and in the bend we sit there
put on our shoes, he with Nikes,
Me with Georgia loggers, get up
and smell the river, go single file
Until we reach the pebbles and sing in French
all the way back to lose the robins forever
lose the Buick, get in the water,
leave another island, leave another
Retreat, leave another kingdom.

Cheswayo Mphanza’s first collection of poems The Rinehart frame (University of Nebraska Press). His poems “Frame Six” and “At David Livingstone’s Statue” will be published in the autumn 2020 issue.