Stanley and China are Mutt & Jeff, Gilbert & Sullivan, Superman & Dale Arden (the love interest of Flash Gordon), walking and racing through the sky, and Eve (the smart independent one) and Adam (the follower). Stanley loves to tune into the cosmos for a reference, a quotation, a proper name.
As an acrobat of fun, this tall verbal trickster transfers sand echoes of the Gobi Desert from Beijing streets into Moss song that he composes wherever he is and way up the Hudson River, where mythical periods far ago the Native Americans (originally Northern Chinese who wandered across the Bering Strait to fish and hunt in North and Latin American streams and jungles) wandered from multiple dynasties up to his railroad station in Riverdale (a fancy mainland in the Bronx). All these figures glow in his personal Sino Celestial Empire. He has scribbled them into infinity. From mythical Yellow Emperor, to poets Li Bai, Du Fu and Wang Wei, his renaissance brethren in the holy poetry racket.
His volume begins in China, then the U.S.A. with the birth of his Chinese godson Alexander Fu. Even Macedonian Alexander the Great (Αλέξανδρος Γʹ ὁ Μακεδών) bows his mighty brow to the young American Chinese, whose birth portends a new portrait of the world. Alexander Fu gives up early intentions to be a cosmologist to become a composer of music. From China we drift to holy Japan, beautiful, political sexual three pages. Then there is a banquet of American Poems Seasoned with Chinese Experience only Stanley could cook up and finally eight months of Stanley Moss recent verse on any subject, from legendary Spanish Jews in Chinese Kaifeng to what he is cooking on his massive black steel stove.
Stanley chose me (I hope I don’t disappoint) because for decades he has read me poem after poem, in draft after draft. I found them wondrous and told him so. I corrected a few things as editors do my junk, but the great river of verse continues. My left ear on Sundays, usually, became Moss ears. Meantime, Stanley published and edited my book 5 A.M. in Beijing. Fun, always fresh and tart like grapefruit, poignant like exile, like death or residence on a star. A dog lover, from early Sancho honoring Don Quixote, Stanley’s other, or any pet whom he treats with dignity. I know here is a little poem William Merwin loved:
NICKY
She danced into the moonless winter, a black dog.
In the morning when I found her I couldn’t get her tongue back in her mouth.
She lies between a Japanese maple and the cellar door, at no one’s feet, without a master.
Stanley Moss is never without an occasion. A frequent one is his birth or death. Here is a great self-minimizing poem that aims, uncovers a very wide scope from the Buddha to Provence in southern France. Through it all we overhear tones of his old friend Dylan Thomas, who also rode the world on a barrel of selected echoing words.
PRAYER
Give me a death like Buddha’s. Let me fall over from eating mushrooms Provençale, a peasant wine pouring down my shirtfront, my last request not a cry but a grunt.
Kicking my heels to heaven, may I succumb tumbling into a rosebush after a love half my age. Though I’m deposed, my tomb shall not be empty; may my belly show above my coffin like a distant hill, my mourners come as if to pass an hour in the country, to see the green, that old anarchy.
Stanley has always been fascinated by the beasts of this world. He transforms them into lovers, carries them to Canadian parks, to a swimming lake, to his house. They are equals or superiors, but he must care for them. To be a dog in the Moss house is a fine way to spend years on our globe.
ZOOPIE
I bought an abused dog in Canada, a golden retriever.
I renamed him Zeus, I kissed him.
After a day he fell off the dock to the bottom of Lake Corry.
I dived down twenty feet, brought him up by the collar.
Eventually he learned to swim. The day he first swam he barked to come into the house after chasing squirrels and deer in the woods.
I kissed Zoopie, for God’s luck.
Stan is ever into world events. We have witnessed the rise and fall of a fake-blonde, would-be American dictator, who has managed to fabricate mini-Trumps, the proud, the corny, the armed, to terrorize our land with their multicolored racist coats. I heard many over the phone and then through the magic of email. But Stanley sees all in a political frame. He recalls, he associates, he expands, and brings in a whole period to furnish his venture. I would like to read aloud to you his amazing poem, A Scream.
Finally, Stan the Man is the unstoppable. That is his protection, his best, his tide of achievement. I like above all the fatal Ferryman, who waits for us all. I would like to quote the whole of The Ferryman here, but alas I will quote only the final lines.
I’m caught not saved, even though I praise King David, Santa Teresa de Ávila
San Juan de la Cruz, the Ferryman who has no name I know will eventually take me by pole and his demon wings, to an island where skeletons dance.
Now I think his accented Greek voice is loud and clear. He’s poling. He shouts my name, I’m hiding. Clear across the Hudson Valley I hear “Repent, repent.” He’s the double of the statue of the murdered Commendatore in Don Giovanni. I answer, “Your excellence, Ferryman, statue, I invite you to dinner.”
I’ve set the table with wine glasses, New York State, Dutchess County red wine, Hudson blue linen napkins, knives, knives, knives, knives, no forks or spoons.
I know in a little while the Ferryman will take me across the Styx in the company of the four seasons, made human: winter, spring, summer and autumn.
Summer wears a wreath of roses crowned with laurel, Spring wears a waistcoat of budding dandelions, Autumn, a coat of fallen maple leaves and grapevines, wrinkled Winter has snowflakes in his hair and beard.
He wears ice snowshoes. I pretend to sleep.
The closing lines of The Ferryman proclaim him as a modern Hermes, sending messages to the world. Our challenge. He invents language. Now let us listen, be thoroughly infiltrated with the irreverent boy down the block, with the challenger, with the Charlie Chaplin conscience of our world, standing, if one can stand nicely on water, on an ocean of uncertainty and brilliant wonder.