I was betrayed by Bohemia early
in my life and left a run-down hotel
with my eye swollen shut by an insect bite
but got my revenge in France and Italy
and wasn't bitten once in those two countries.

I swore off free meals and book-stealing
both there and elsewhere and
if I got something for nothing
it wasn't by schnorring
so have a heart, pedagogus.

Think of Baudelaire and his clouds
or Michelangelo on his stepladder
putting a little spit in for tone
and a gob or two for substance
just to please the flunkies down there

even as they kicked the wooden legs
their tongues out in excitement
though I have to interrupt to say
God did it with a voice not a finger,
n'est-ce pas?


About This Poem
"The poem, which has an internal and musical logic, considers two things, bohemia-good and bad-and the artist in his act. There is a turn, almost as if in a sonnet, in the eleventh line, which begins the second half of the poem; it is Michelangelo at his ceiling, and the papal flunkies below, kicking the stepladder. But God communicated with her voice, not with her finger, as in Michelangelo (and Yeats)."
-Gerald Stern

About Gerald Stern
Gerald Stern is the author of "Galaxy Love," forthcoming from W.W. Norton in 2017. He lives in Lambertville, N.J.

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The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day[at]poets.org.


(c) 2016 Gerald Stern. Originally published in Poem-a-Day, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate