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To hear Gerald Stern read this poem, click here.
I said, “Dear Larry,” as I put down his book, Elegy,
across the street from the Home Energy Center
and its two embellished secular Christmas trees
and its two red wreaths over red ribbon crosses
enshrining a thirty inch stove in one of its windows
and a fifty gallon water heater in the other,
knowing how wise he would have been with the parking lot
and the tree that refused against all odds and all
sane agreements and codicils to let its dead leaves
for God’s sake fall in some kind of trivial decency
and how he would have stopped with me always beside him
to watch a girl in a white fur parka and boots
build the first snowball on Northampton Street she collected
from the hood of a Ford Fairlane underneath that tree
and throw it she thought at a small speed limit sign
although it landed with a fluff just shy of the twin
painted center lines inducing the three of us,
her lover, Larry, and I to make our own snowballs
from the hoods and fenders of our own Fairlanes although
she threw like none of us and to add to it
she was left-handed, so bless her, may she have
a good job and children and always be free of cancer
and may the two of us scrape some roofs before the
rain relieves us, and may we find gloves for our labor.
