A Gardener in Paradise

And he still dreamed of a style
so clear it could wash a face,
or make a dry mouth sing.
—Bert Meyers, “The Poets”

Reading Bert Meyers cleanses the senses. His poems intimately connect a reader to the physical gifts of the earth, to truly being an animal, and to the living, trembling moment. When I need to ground myself, touch the essential natures of things, I read Bert Meyers. As I read him, I have the illusion that I can somehow hold his images in my hands, like cherished toys. Bread, insects, orchards, windows, rags, brooms, seeds, weeds, birds, children, ashes, a hammer and nails. Even the sun, moon, and stars. His images are that tactile, concise, and alive.

When I want to remind myself of the power of small things, I read Bert’s lines: “I like the subtle snail:/ ... and where it goes, it paints/the ground with useless roads.” For me, this recalls Guy de Maupassant’s quote, “The smallest thing has something unknown in it.” Bert’s poems teach us to gaze intently, with our whole, hungry souls, and to recognize immensities in the seemingly simple, the apparently humble, the easily overlooked.

Bert’s poems make me think of Francis Ponge (in their fascination with objects and animals) and Marc Chagall (in their Jewish dreaminess) and eastern European poets like Charles Simic and Attila József. When I try to recall him as teacher (I briefly knew Bert! His work and his generosity as a writing professor changed my life!) I remember his famous cumulous whirl of curly, gray-white hair, which did look like smoke. I remember the slim, elegant cigarettes he puffed incessantly. (Were they Gauloises?) These cigarettes (unfiltered?), which seemed to me synonymous with real literary sophistication, eventually killed Bert. I also remember the gap between his front teeth which lent his grin a roguish note.

The anger detonations in his poems are controlled but potent: I am emboldened and comforted by those ruptures. I love Bert’s skepticism about so-called civilization and how he shakes his fist at it. Some of his poems compare civilization’s effects on nature to that of an encroaching disease. Edward Germain, in the introduction to English and American Surrealist Poetry (an anthology that contains three of Bert’s poems) wrote of the surrealist poets’ “need to create a vision superior to the ugliness of contemporary civilization.” An apt observation about Bert’s work. Did Bert consider himself a surrealist? I would have loved to ask him about that.

Relatedly, Bert’s poetry has, for all its lyricism, an anti-authoritarian strain. He rears up from time to time against soul-killing aspects of American life. That and his concern for the despoilment of the planet are among the qualities that make his work so timely. There is a feeling in some of the poems of a man who allows himself to see and feel everything, to revel in myriad forms of beauty and darkness, but who is also keeping himself in check, in order to live a humane and ethical life, albeit on his terms. And hovering inside the work too is a sense of incipient rebellion against those forces that repress him unreasonably, meanly, or too much. He sometimes chafes against an excess of social constraint, propriety, and domestication. Forces that hinder us all, in different ways.

When I read Bert’s poem “Signature,” containing the lovely phrase “a gardener/in paradise,” I became curious about whether Jewish notions of paradise include gardens. I found this sentence describing one model of Jewish paradise: “Each day in Paradise one wakes up a child and goes to bed an elder to enjoy the pleasures of childhood, youth, adulthood, and old age.” Bert died at fifty-one, so he never got to enjoy the “pleasures of old age,” whatever those might be. But the voice in his poems does seem to me the voice of someone ageless, or who is all ages at once, a wanderer who in each poem can speak from his child, youthful, and adult selves seamlessly, and perhaps also from some far-seeing, archetype-rich, ancient, collective self.