A PRIMER ON PARALLEL LIVES
by
Dan Gerber
Paper, 91 pages
ISBN 978-1-55659-253-9
Previously published in Rain Taxi Review
Dan Gerber has been writing off the radar screen of the literary establishment for years. The author of six volumes of poetry, three novels, a collection of short stories, and two works of nonfiction, his writing is as concise as a long-time practitioner of this difficult art can be. No less a poet than W.S. Merwin has described Gerber s verse as a purity of language, and Merwin is only partially correct, for there is also a purity of image, tone, and what might first seem a simple insight but which is not so simple, but rather far reaching.
In his latest volume, A Primer on Parallel Lives, Gerber explores the person walking beside him who is not so much another person but himself. And throughout these poems is the symbol of the strength and endurance of oak trees, as if the trees themselves are a parallel life, as In the Shade of the Oaks, where Gerber contemplates the growing length of shadows as evening wears on, and asks:
Will you lie down here in the shade of these
oaks?
Will you let your shadow lie down?
All too often the answer seems to be no, for in the second section of this book, Gerber tunnels into the cave of childhood, the parallel existence of how we live now in relation to the memories of what once occurred when we were children. These poems are bittersweet and tear at the tissue of your heart. It s as if what s left of us is all that s left at the end of the couplet Eclipse:
Our shadow sweeps the Sea of Tranquility
till we re only a small bruise on the
moon s left temple.
Gerber moves beyond this compelling image to recount his sense, as a young boy, how his father was often away, how his mother feigned the need to visit an ill friend when in fact the friend was a lover ( Momma s Boy ), and how:
He learned his longing from his mother.
Her eyes reached out for what she
couldn t see
and framed a space he d have to fill
with other eyes that never rested,
and never could it seemed.
( Her Eyes ) All this seems beautifully and aptly said in the simplest, clearest manner in the first of the Five Poems: Off the Beaten Track:
At times we experience the past as an avalanche,
at others as an anchor,
till our raft is swept
beyond the sight of land
on water we haven t yet seen.
The sense of loss in these poems is palpable, but there is far more here than an exposition of loss, how to come to terms with loss, and how to continue on with dignity, grace, appreciation, and a sensitivity so refined that very little in the smallest of details escape both focus and attention, as in Secrets:
Sometimes I see the shadow of a bird
cross my path
and can t find a bird in
the sky.
As Gerber tells us in Tracking the Moment, when he looks into a small, dark pond, it s as if he has peered into the pupil of the planet, and this he seems to do throughout this fine volume. And despite all he sees that we might never see, he recognizes, even for himself, How little we see even on the best days. We would all do well if we, as Gerber, found the fiber of life in all its intricacies, as when he heard the wild call of a fox and also heard something so certain it stunned my heart / with what I once was, and may / yet be.
This deep conviction, at times lost for most of us, at other times only as tenuous as a thin wet rope we might try to grab hold of, is what sustains these poems as a greater whole. As Gerber says at the end of Tracking the Moment:
I press my dog s forehead to my own
and hold it till I feel
her calmness seep through,
till the restless
equation I ve made of the world
is simply the world
again.
We can all do worse than this, and few of us better. Reading Gerber s poetry is a way for us to sense more than we usually do as if his poems seep within us, becoming part of us, and we a part of them.
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