Night Life
How can this equal rest or peace, this garble of gasps, snuffles,
and horse-like snorts? His lips flutter as though he’s blowing
bubbles, his moans so choked he must be drowning…or are
his legs being sucked in by quicksand, the way a restaurant
critic sucks the bones of her osso buco? In my overheated,
night-gowned silence I watch him flinch in a puddle of bedside
light. A range of ages and plights wash over his face. Who is
this sleeping, unshaven male, this slab of snoring meat, this
leaky ship of divinity? I stare across the chasm which divides
each waking or sleeping creature, whether they’ve touched
each other or not. He’s a magician who made an orchard
disappear, an unhinged shooter from St. Louis, a plum
colored shadow, a handful of chameleon teeth, one of god’s
toboggans, a tree denuded of leaves bleeding beads of amber.
--Amy Gerstler (from Index of Women)
Amy Gerstler has published thirteen books of poems. The most recent is Index of Women (Penguin Random House, 2021). In 2019, she received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts CD Wright Grant. In 2018, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her previous books include Scattered at Sea and Dearest Creature. She is currently working on a musical play with composer/arranger/actor Steve Gunderson.
The New York School Diaspora (Part Nineteen): Amy Gerstler
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his Biograpia Literaria of 1817, draws a signal distinction, declaring that “the objects of fancy are fixed and dead”; whereas the objects of imagination are imbued with “esemplastic power.” In Amy Gerstler’s humorous and revelatory poem, “Night Life,” the object of her imagination, her sleeping partner, is anything but “fixed and dead.” In fact, the poem embodies a rare quality I’ll call “logo-plasticity,” in which a poem’s images, made of words, rise from the page to model a sculptural and kinesthetic likeness. The poem’s speaker watches in “overheated, nightgowned silence” as whole swathes of human and animal peril are enacted to appalling dramatic effect: “. . . or are / his legs being sucked in by quicksand, the way a restaurant critic / sucks the bones of her osso buco?” With the speaker, we grow transfixed as “a range of ages and plights wash across his face,” and wonder “Who is / this sleeping, unshaven male, this slab of snoring meat, this / leaky ship of divinity?” Coming after what may be the poem’s most hilarious comparison, “this slab of snoring meat,” “this / leaky ship of divinity” announces a turn in Gerstler’s free-wheeling sonnet. The partner’s disordered repose becomes an entrée into mystery, “the chasm that divides / each waking or sleeping creature, whether they’ve touched / each other or not.” What a direct, modest, and thus effective way to describe the isolation in which we move. Observer turned sculptor, the speaker cycles the dreaming man through deeds and identities, including the astonishing, tragi-comic “God’s toboggan,” shifting him to shapes that contain us all: murderous, yet powerless; decaying, yet primordial in beauty: “a tree denuded of leaves bleeding beads of amber.” Amy Gerstler’s “Night Life” is the work of a poetic magus.
--Angela Ball
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