THE LAST FIVE MILES TO GRACE
by
David Lerner
Zeitgeist Press
www.aeitgeist-press.com
Paper, 170 pages
ISBN 0-929730-72-0
Previously published in Bloomsbury Review
Only 46 years old when a drug overdose killed him, David Lerner has left us poems that dance down the streets of San Francisco, leading a small band of poets, misfits, and sinners whom Jesus might have tended to but whom fundamentalist Christians in the suburbs would surely shun like the narrator of these lines from Satan After Hours:
Satan is a cold
fried egg
on
a plastic plate
a
cup of weak coffee beside it
while the telephone rings
Lerner s poetry, written to be spoken and heard, uses the repetition of phrasing at the beginning of stanzas to obtain rhythm and power, music and flow. Often it blasts you into the back seat of a speeding car with no wheels, such as the question he poses in The Question.
how
many shovels does it take to
dig
up the bloody heart of the world
and
start it ticking
As Lerner knew, you must carry your fear like a flag ( The Long Walk ). This he does, sensitive enough to know that:
I
was so alone the wind in my hair
was
enough to make me weep
a
leaf getting crushed
could
ruin my day
( 18th and Broadway )
Nor did he fear taking on the literary establishment or any kind of established authority. He fits perfectly what Jim Harrison said about the poet s primary job to be a sworn enemy of the state. As Lerner wrote in The Future Task of Language:
the
future task of language
is
to
drive
a cherry-red Mercedes-Benz
into
the heart of hell
and
place a bet on God
This kind of bet Lerner seems to have made often, even if the first dance is also the last. ( I Will Wear Rags ) Not even Gary Snyder is safe here, an ironic twist given that Snyder and the Beats were once the rebels who, in Lerner s view, have since become the establishment, with Snyder more concerned about some impossible and non-existent rural utopia cloaked in Buddhism, while Lerner lives and thrives in the grit of the city. Given a choice, Lerner would rather be the murderer Richard Speck than Gary Snyder. ( Mein Kampf )
I d rather
sell arms to Martians
than wait sullenly for a
letter from some diseased clown with
a
three-piece mind
telling me that I ve won a
bullet proof pair of rose-colored
glasses
for my poem Autumn in the Spring
( Mein Kampf )
While each literary generation is often bent on deconstructing the principles of the prior generation, what is rarely recognized is that the attempt to avoid the most recent tradition is, in itself, a tradition as old as literary practice. What Lerner s work does recognize, however, is how any kind of world can unravel into hellish depths, as his apparently frequently did, as his poem The Destroyed shows:
The destroyed live
with panic the way
others do with morning
cough
And while most of us might seek sunshine, Lerner sought something else, something more disturbing, something darker and more difficult to comprehend. For him, The sky isn t gray enough. ( Traveling Light ) Influenced greatly by Rimbaud, Lerner juxtaposes startling images to sear something deep and primal inside each of us:
Sing for your life
as butterflies drown in
kettles of blood
sing like there s
something behind you
( Sing )
Lerner s poems often reflect this kind of innate fear, that something or someone is coming up behind him, hunting him down. The kind of truth Lerner sought seems possible only in the slightest of glimmers, largely inaccessible. As he said when he metaphorically tried to sell truth serum on the street, no one could figure out/what it was good for. ( If I Die Tomorrow ) But he never quit looking for what he couldn t quite find:
I just want a moment
of truth
so vast
that all the lights on
the planet
dim
for a second . . .
( Ground
Zero )
For Lerner, the matter of truth probably got no closer than his question to Van Gogh the question that if you have your own easel, whether God might allow you to paint the sky. ( Van Gogh, Can You Tell Me . . . ) While Lerner didn t paint the sky, he painted his soul, tattered as it was.
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