“I”

All poems start by accident, and every poem worth its salt was unpredicted and, as often as not, has its genesis at a low point in the poet’s journey—which turns out to be a good metaphor: Once, I was on a bus going south on Second Avenue in New York, an especially low point, when I saw from my window an odd-looking one-story building made of smooth stone, sort of shining there, at the southeast corner of Twenty-third, with a phrase from Isaiah carved in its side: “This house shall be called a House of Prayer for all People.” I pressed the magic strip and jumped out. I had been given a gift—the material for a long poem in the very middle of a busy neighborhood on an as-yet untransformed, unredeemed corner.

The building was a synagogue, or to be more accurate an ex-synagogue, called the East End Temple. The windows were boarded up, there were building permits pasted and nailed to the plywood, and it was waiting to be rebuilt, remade, or torn down. The building next door—all this I indicate in the poem—was a standard three-story red-brick with a fire escape on the outside. It probably housed the rabbi’s study, meeting rooms, classrooms, and the like. It was also empty. My guess is the whole corner will give way to an apartment building for the nouveaux-greedy and the house of God will be just a memory, since the whole neighborhood is rousing itself. Across the street, to the west, is the Cosmos Diner, an old local greasy, and to the east, a few blocks distant, is the East River, and Greenpoint, across the way, in Brooklyn. All this is in the poem.

Biblical scholars for the last century or so have ascertained, based on historical and linguistic evidence, that there is not one Isaiah but several, perhaps many. Common knowledge, this. First Isaiah, Proto-Isaiah, wrote chapters one through thirty-nine; Deutero-Isaiah, chapters forty through fifty-five; and Trito-Isaiah, fifty-six through sixty-six—though Trito-Isaiah may have been written by disciples of Deutero-Isaiah; several, or many. If I mention Isaiah Four, it is with comic and bitter tongue-in-cheek. It would not only be presumptuous, it would be ridiculous otherwise. I’m sorry if the consequence seems disrespectful or sacrilegious—God, not that! What I do, or try to do, is create an imaginary figure who, in a few emotional outbursts, acts out or re-enacts some of the original outbursts as imagined in a modern setting or ones that might occur in such a place, at such a time. Furthermore, “I” is a narrative, action over time, and not, as such, separate poems of praise or scorn that could be rearranged as they circle about a felt center (the way Isaiah of the Bible is, or might be). Furthermore, and most important, whatever “I” does or doesn’t do, it’s not for the sake of, or out of fear of, or knowledge of, or even longing for deity, beard or no beard. If he (“I”) is sometimes scathing in his denunciations (though he acts more out of wonder) it’s not out of duty or terror; it’s the way he is. It’s not that he has no sense of the sacred. He has too much. Even that ridiculous schul, even the diner, even the East River and the dilapidated buildings beyond are sacred.

Somewhere I read that Isaiah—Proto-Isaiah?—was finally sawn in half for being too insistent, too uncompromising, naming names and the like. I hope he died on the straw instead, or the wool, whatever they used. I don’t know where “I” will die. In the Cosmos Diner? Maybe he did already. Maybe he’s going to do the absolutely unforgivable—buy a glass of vinegary wine, piss-water—to go with his enormous piece of greasy chicken. For which he does deserve the saw.

—Gerald Stern