A Bernadette Mayer Reader

by Bernadette Mayer

  all the poems you said you made

  The Ballad of Theodore

  I saw my father

  and then he was here

  and dressed in a suit

  he asked for a beer

  I hadn’t seen him

  alive since 1957

  dead I often see him

  once in a while

  He was all too calm

  he was like a businessman

  I got him a Moosehead

  from the grocery next door

  He’d walked into our school

  daring and dead

  “I havent talked to you in centuries”

  “How good to see you,” I said

  He put on the head of a power animal

  this time it was the tall giraffe

  my father then wore a longer cloak

  & I was shaking hands with his hoof,

  no kidding

  It was quite a good time we had

  he’d doffed the clothing of his absence

  & no dead man is scared of being dead

  & most of the living are full of this,

  his form of innocence

  We conversed, it wasnt startling

  I was twelve when he died

  his new disguises were a method

  to let particular animals as grownups confide

  He foreswore the walls of the school

  and that’s where I lost him

  no trick of time bemoaned his anxious fate

  (I’m only fooling)

  We drove cars backwards

  ate acacia leaves, then

  made witty conversation

  wore bathing suits & swam together again

  I lost him in the dream’s sudden regular twist

  like he was an aristocratic woman

  going from supper to a game of whist

  instead of what he really was—an electrician

  who loved Frankenstein

  I saw my father Theodore

  & then he was there

  a vegetarian ruminant silent giraffe

  full of his new & current perfect past

  All dressed in a suit as if quite dead

  but only at first, then as mammal animal

  he asked me for a beer, he said

  “Here death is not emotional”

  Sonnet

  Swell is the attribute of leisure

  Found dead in immaculate house

  I walked by you I walked

  right by you, she read me

  The pretty good poem of my father

  I can hear the pen click, the pen

  Makes noise, I do have to finish my work

  For money, let’s count to six

  And when at the beginning of a story

  You I thank the blank rectangle of that blue

  Fire escape experiment, it’s a color

  You can see because darker in minutes

  Ending sky then never met did not

  if not of something done, then imitation

  Mums

  The lord is pregnant & we are not likely

  to make her not so to open the window

  in her presence is the fragile pot of

  potent tea, the white lilies that are really

  called tulips, the upbeat miniature mums yellow

  red as the poison poinsettia he whose

  flowers are actually only leaves—they all sit

  on the frozen table like a big thin flag trying

  out inventing happiness thru complication of abstraction

  as if democracy could not not outlaw things

  or if a man what no no man could a woman did not

  there was an appropriate absence of identification,

  this is no

  secret message counted in ways time can afford

  any average bunch of angels compare not to our lord

  Failures in Infinitives

  why am i doing this? Failure

  to keep my work in order so as

  to be able to find things

  to paint the house

  to earn enough money to live on

  to reorganize the house so as

  to be able to paint the house &

  to be able to find things and

  earn enough money so as

  to be able to put books together

  to publish works and books

  to have time

  to answer mail & phone calls

  to wash the windows

  to make the kitchen better to work in

  to have the money to buy a simple radio

  to listen to while working in the kitchen

  to know enough to do grownups work in the world

  to transcend my attitude

  to an enforced poverty

  to be able to expect my checks

  to arrive on time in the mail

  to not always expect that they will not

  to forget my mother’s attitudes on humility or

  to continue

  to assume them without suffering

  to forget how my mother taunted my father

  about money, my sister about i cant say it

  failure to forget mother and father enough

  to be older, to forget them

  to forget my obsessive uncle

  to remember them some other way

  to remember their bigotry accurately

  to cease to dream about lions which always is

  to dream about them, I put my hand in the lion’s mouth

  to assuage its anger, this is not a failure

  to notice that’s how they were; failure

  to repot the plants

  to be neat

  to create & maintain clear surfaces

  to let a couch or a chair be a place for sitting down

  and not a table

  to let a table be a place for eating & not a desk

  to listen to more popular music

  to learn the lyrics

  to not need money so as

  to be able to write all the time

  to not have to pay rent, con ed or telephone bills

  to forget parents’ and uncle’s early deaths so as

  to be free of expecting care; failure

  to love objects

  to find them valuable in any way; failure

  to preserve objects

  to buy them and

  to now let them fall by the wayside; failure

  to think of poems as objects

  to think of the body as an object; failure

  to believe; failure

  to know nothing; failure

  to know everything; failure

  to remember how to spell failure; failure

  to believe the dictionary & that there is anything

  to teach; failure

  to teach properly; failure

  to believe in teaching

  to just think that everybody knows everything

  which is not my failure; I know everyone does; failure

  to see not everyone believes this knowing and

  to think we cannot last till the success of knowing

  to wash all the dishes only takes ten minutes

  to write a thousand poems in an hour

  to do an epic, open the unwashed window

  to let in you know who and

  to spirit thoughts and poems away from concerns

  to just let us know, we will

  to paint your ceilings & walls for free

  Say Goodbye to Legacy

  you cant say

  i think it’s just

  the best thing

  he gets in

  i ever liked

  the gap

  this is where

  i woke up happy

  they wanna go

  walking down the street

  that kind of language

  i found

  not reasonable

  as if everybody

  gets in

  so many fights


  dolls like this

  great burgers

  the cocoon

  girl shopping

  to everyone

  my lost sense

  your boyfriend

  takes cares of

  so many fights

  they’re not very

  now say goodbye

  I must’ve dreamed

  I saw a dead guy

  you learn from your girlfriend

  your lost sense

  has had so many girlfriends

  their own money

  cuddly to legacy

  that i was happy

  in a crowd of people

  like take off your clothes before

  you their

  own money

  so many fights

  better than nothing

  get into bed

  Beginning Middle End

  Rushed slowly up rushing stream road path

  beginning at the interstitial meadow park

  to see description we fell in past where

  a recent tree had fallen bared wood color

  of the mess of the pre-spring forest

  Up & down root rock mud two-white-dot trail

  right by Half-an-Abandoned-Smoked-Ham Corners

  to the 2nd bridge where the postured guide escorted

  9 times 9 some cynical hikers across, he shouted

  “Space it!” We watched to wait to ask no destination

  Cool air rushes to the hiking head by icier parts

  Max straddles a downed tree to knock at dangling ice

  Philip leaps to rescue my cooling blue bandanna from

  small pools to small falls, strips a fine pine

  walking stick, we hike back to watch methods

  of getting mud off shoes: roll em sideways in

  the dry dead grass; spray em with water like

  houseplants; change them for other shoes

  Roll back to city through thousands of households

  of cars to home of reminders & dumb attempts at order

  Experimentation in Rubrics

  I red will not be good

  I red will not do what I should

  I red will at random rubricate

  Your beautiful ass tonight

  You are my specific sentence

  You’re my first letter

  My any A or letter else of any color

  No one can hear our sounds

  My words outloud are gone the sky’s

  Lost its unknown animals now it’s

  Black as the pen is law as are

  So many centuries will pass before

  You come home to my house I pray

  You will conduct me glossily

  In sex & its love proscribed

  By all four of our parents

  Tonight today now later

  Like a title for a chapter

  Of an illumined book

  Manicatriarchic Sonnet

  I am nothing but a list of things to do

  this is not etcetera or red umbrella either

  i think i did the things that might help others

  for Marie for Danine for Wanda for the scifi writers

  i started to write the letter about my new book of frowns

  and then i stopped, mother, to see if you were around

  only fooling you preventer of all my motion

  i did though then want to see a big immobile tree

  absent from the scifi histories of dignity

  the way girls can talk without counting in

  some fearsome sect of the absolute no one’d approve of

  especially my bigoted parents who could love them

  talk girls talk on into the night

  there might be a second that rhymes with disaster

  Marie Makes Fun of

  Me at the Shore

  for Bill Corbett

  Marie says

  look tiny red spiders

  are walking

  across the pools

  & just as I am writing down

  tiny red

  spiders are

  walking across the pools

  She says Mom I can just see it

  in your poem it’ll say

  tiny red spiders are walking

  across the pools

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to the editors of the magazines and anthologies in which these poems and prose pieces have appeared: John Ashbery, Bill Berkson, Heather Booth, Cydney Chadwick, Laura Chester, Andrei Codrescu, Clark Coolidge, Michael Cuddihy, Bill DeNoyelles, Kenward Elmslie, Larry Fagin, Miven Findlay, Ed Foster, Peter Gizzi, Philip Good, Richard Grossinger, Bill Henderson, Jan Herman, Michael Lally, Gary Lenhart, Greg Masters, Connell McGrath, Tim Monaghan, Wendy Mulford, Charles North, Alice Notley, Ron Padgett, Michael Palmer, Todd Pinney, George Quasha, Tom Savage, Leslie Scalapino, Peter Schjeldahl, Michael Scholnick, James Schuyler, David Shapiro, Ron Silliman, Ethelyn Stearns, Chris Tysh, George Tysh, Anne Waldman, Barret Watten, and others.

  Copyright © 1992, 1990, 1989, 1985, 1984, 1983, 1982, 1978, 1976, 1975, 1971, 1968 by Bernadette Mayer

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, or television review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As indicated in the Contents, many of the poems and prose pieces collected in A Bernadette Mayer Reader were originally published in small press books and chap-books. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors and publishers of Story (0 to 9 Books, 1968); Moving, Ceremony Latin (1964), and The Golden Book of Words (Angel Hair Books, 1971, 1975, and 1978, by permission of Anne Waldman); Studying Hunger (Big Sky, 1975, by permission of Bill Berkson); Memory (North Atlantic Books, 1975, by permission of Richard Grossinger); Poetry (Kulchur Foundation, 1976, by permission of Lita Hornick); Midwinter Day (Turtle Island Foundation, 1982, by permission of Bob Callahan); Utopia (United Artists, 1983); Incidents Report Sonnets (Archipelago Books, 1984, by permission of Peggy DeCoursey); Mutual Aid (Mademoiselle de la Mole Press, 1985); Sonnets (Tender Buttons, 1989, by permission of Lee Ann Brown); and The Formal Field of Kissing (Catchword Papers, 1990, by permission of Paul Cummings).

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: Very special thanks are due to Erik Rieselbach for his invaluable help with A Bernadette Mayer Reader.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First published as New Directions Paperbook 739 in 1992

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Limited

  eISBN 978-0-8112-2546-5

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

  by New Directions Publishing Corporation,

  80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011