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    Sailing through Cassiopeia
    Sailing through Cassiopeia
    Sailing through Cassiopeia
    Ebook112 pages35 minutes

    Sailing through Cassiopeia

    By Dan Gerber

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    About this ebook

    "Gerber has a gentle touch and an unaffected, articulate voice that can be smart, funny, wisesometimes all at the same time."Library Journal

    "The thing itself carries the weight of [Gerber's] poems, which recall the deep imagery of Vallejo, Neruda, and Wright."Rain Taxi

    Dan Gerber's mastery of layered imagery and crystalline vision marry European Romanticism with American Zen. These meditative poems engage the natural landscape of California's oak savannas and memories of childhood, while calling upon an array of literary progenitorsfrom Robinson Jeffers and Rainer Maria Rilke to the classics of the Chinese canonexploring what it means to be linguistically alive in an animal world. As ForeWord magazine wrote, "Dan Gerber's poems are quick, graceful, alert to their surroundings, and rarely wasting a motion."

    "The Word is the Picture of Things"

    Looking down at the lights of Earth,
    its constellations of lives,
    however unaware,
    signal back to the watching galaxies
    that have their seeing inside us.

    I praised flight and got stuck.
    I praised gravity and got lost.

    Along the way my life

    decays, and ripens . . .

    Dan Gerber is the author of seven collections of poetry, three novels, a book of short stories, and two books of nonfiction. A former racecar driver, he has traveled extensively as a journalist, particularly in Africa. His books have earned a Michigan Author Award and the Mark Twain Award. He lives in Santa Ynez, California.


    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopper Canyon Press
    Release dateApr 23, 2013
    ISBN9781619320345
    Sailing through Cassiopeia
    Author

    Dan Gerber

    Dan Gerber's Trying to Catch the Horses (MSU Press) received Foreword Magazine's Book of the Year Award in Poetry, and A Primer on Parallel Lives (Copper Canyon) won the Michigan Notable Book Award.  His work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Poetry, The Nation, and The Sun.  Along with poetry collections, Gerber has published three novels, a collection of short stories, and two books of nonfiction. He and his wife Debbie live with their menagerie, domestic and wild, in the mountains of California’s Central Coast.

    Read more from Dan Gerber

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      Book preview

      Sailing through Cassiopeia - Dan Gerber

      I

      IN OUR RENTED CABIN

      I live my late years as if I’ve stolen my life.

      TU FU 712–770

      My son and grandson sleep in the next room.

      I’ve been awake and up for hours,

      and they will likely sleep a few more.

      Is it an old man’s hunger

      to take in all he can

      of what’s left of his life?

      Though still a year short of seventy,

      not really old; yet

      my father and grandfather didn’t

      live much past it.

      This morning I think I’m up early for them,

      watching the first light

      spread like soft butter

      over the rolling meadows of the foothills

      and the little green pastures

      on the mountains above.

      I can’t get enough of this moment.

      What is it that urges me on

      to take it all in,

      to save what I can

      for them to see through my eyes?

      PRELUDE TO A STARRY NIGHT

      At any moment the red-shouldered hawk

      may fly right past my window

      without even thinking about it,

      may perch like a finial at the very tip-

      top of the summer live oak

      that is both living and dying.

      At any moment the phone may ring

      with life-changing news,

      and the sound again

      will never be the same.

      At any moment the great storm,

      still out over the sea—

      in which the somber clouds grumble—

      may move in over the shore

      behind which we feel so secure

      while we dream of ships going down.

      At any moment the frogs—

      having grown used to my presence

      here on the hill above the pond—

      may resume their conjuring of the twilight,

      calling down the Summer Triangle,

      just now assuming its throne,

      as this gaggle of stars I’ve been parsing

      snaps into Lyra, quite suddenly.

      FIRST LIGHT

      Morning, busy in the distance,

      hammer blows, airplane in clouds.

      Crows, muffled growling of a saw, steady pulse

      of silence holding it together.

      Pause between breathing in,

      and out.

      Thought of air thinking

      day’s first light.

      Foothills flaunting their ridges.

      Losing the moment as I saw it;

      finding it in its changes.

      PROLEGOMENON

      I resign

      to the cries of others in me,

      resign to my own imperfections,

      no longer pleased or satisfied

      judging others

      for the thought of their judging me.

      DRIVING HOME

      It’s perfect, I said one day,

      the thought

      coming out of nothing I knew,

      to no one sitting beside me,

      while driving home from the market,

      said this without thinking, it seems,

      but could there be such a pure expression

      with no intention to express?

      The fields were incomparably green,

      the sky incomparably blue,

      lupine and poppies almost

      blared from the

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