The End of Michelangelo

By Dan Gerber

• This is the fourth
  Gerber poetry book published by Copper Canyon
• Gerber’s work has
  appeared in many popular national publications, including The New Yorker;
  Poetry; Playboy; Sports Illustrated; and The Nation
• Born and raised in
  Michigan, Gerber retains strong ties to the Midwest, winning the Mark Twain
  Award for Distinguished Contributions to Midwestern Literature, a Michigan
  Authors Award, and the Society of Midland
  Authors award
• Gerber’s
  fiction was brought back into print, and his nonfiction collected in book form,
  through Michigan State University Press
• As a
  poet, Gerber is known especially for his ability to offer consolation and grace through aesthetic
  contemplation, epiphanies in nature, and deep recollection of memories.
• Gerber is the only
  American poet who also had a career as a race-car driver and was honored with a
  limited-edition replica of his car, a1966 Shelby Mustang. (As of January 2022,
  you could find one on Ebay for about $250.)
• Gerber is an ordained
  Zen priest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Release date: Oct 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781619322646

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.

Book preview

I

Consciousness seems like a mirror of water which shows

the viewer now the sky, now the depths; and often the water

is jostled and stirred, and makes a multitude of mirrors

and transparencies, an inextricable image.

P AUL V ALÉRY

Walking toward the End

I’m beating north again,

a thousand miles

from the pole, and as it’s

still late summer, I

may get a long way

before cold nights

and the hunger of old age

consume me, a little

lighter each day, having

left more of life’s

sweet confusion in

the grasses I’ve been

tracking through since

crossing above

the tree line a week ago,

toward something

I sense I’ve always been,

my hunger and discomfort only

physical, slaked by the joy

of having nothing

but the next low ridge ahead,

as far as I can see.

World

There is nothing in the picture

you don’t see. That is, there

is nothing in the picture, but

you can’t see it, as there

is also nothing beyond the picture,

which you can see. As you watch

the picture and begin to notice

more, the nothing grows less, but

never less than nothing. For you,

the picture has no separate

being, and, like you, the

nothing in the picture exists.

As children, we learn to see a ball, a tree,

a dog sitting at the moment.

The dog knows little of our confusion, and

yet calms us with her eyes.

Staying Home

for Deb

It felt like hiding out, you said,

waiting for the plague to die down,

keeping watch for the lives left behind.

You said you saw a soaring hawk let go

a great white glittering shit,

a handful of tinsel in the wind,

making the sky even more blue.

I saw it too from the other side

of the house where I’d been alone,

bowing to the landscape for absorbing me

all afternoon, as I sat there. I don’t know

where the time went while I was waiting,

as if for a sign, to come find you.

Practice

Seeing his bodily form, alive

in the grass and trees,

becoming a small stone, tumbling

through a clear stream,

stretching out the space

between two thoughts

waiting around a silence in which

the thought can still hear him breathing.

In Praise of Blue

The brain has never seen the sky, but

through the eye’s translation

enjoys the colors it receives, and then,

there’s blue, the presence

of the light of which, we know,

even the sightless can sense,

a light within? a color

into which we’re born, or

borne out of, on a whim?

color of grieving in ancient Rome, of

ecstasy in Greece, of divinity

in Egypt, of Renaissance virgins, lavished

in ultramarine, of infinite

distance, of mourning dove’s moan;

lying awake in bed, deciding,

if only to delight

in blue, as I perceive it, to be

alive another day.

Friday

I got an all clear on the

biopsy of a false-positive that kept

my life dancing, for a week, near the

edge of a cliff, trying to meditate in

a quiet room with one fat fly