The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan
Page 30
Here they are the wheels, so I hear.
Bon voyage, little ones.
Follow me down
Through the locks. There is no key.
Red Shift
Here I am at 8:08 p.m. indefinable ample rhythmic frame
The air is biting, February, fierce arabesques
on the way to tree in winter streetscape
I drink some American poison liquid air which bubbles
and smoke to have character and to lean
In. The streets look for Allen, Frank, or me, Allen
is a movie, Frank disappearing in the air, it’s
Heavy with that lightness, heavy on me, I heave
through it, them, as
The Calvados is being sipped on Long Island now
twenty years almost ago, and the man smoking
Is looking at the smilingly attentive woman, & telling.
Who would have thought that I’d be here, nothing
wrapped up, nothing buried, everything
Love, children, hundreds of them, money, marriage-
ethics, a politics of grace,
Up in the air, swirling, burning even or still, now
more than ever before?
Not that practically a boy, serious in corduroy car coat
eyes penetrating the winter twilight at 6th
& Bowery in 1961. Not that pretty girl, nineteen, who was
going to have to go, careening into middle-age so,
To burn, & to burn more fiercely than even she could imagine
so to go. Not that painter who from very first meeting
I would never & never will leave alone until we both vanish
into the thin air we signed up for & so demanded
To breathe & who will never leave me, not for sex, nor politics
nor even for stupid permanent estrangement which is
Only our human lot & means nothing. No, not him.
There’s a song, “California Dreaming”, but no, I won’t do that.
I am 43. When will I die? I will never die, I will live
To be 110, & I will never go away, & you will never escape from me
who am always & only a ghost, despite this frame, Spirit
Who lives only to nag.
I’m only pronouns, & I am all of them, & I didn’t ask for this
You did
I came into your life to change it & it did so & now nothing
will ever change
That, and that’s that.
Alone & crowded, unhappy fate, nevertheless
I slip softly into the air
The world’s furious song flows through my costume.
Around the Fire
What I’m trying to say is that if an experience is
proposed to me—I don’t have any particular interest
in it—Any more than anything else. I’m interested in
anything. Like I could walk out the door right now and go somewhere
else. I don’t have any center in that sense. If you’ll look
in my palm you’ll see that my heart and my head line are
the same and if you’ll look in your palm you’ll see that it’s
different. My heart and my head feel exactly the same. Me,
I like to lay around of a Sunday and drink beer. I don’t feel
a necessity for being a mature person in this world. I mean
all the grown-ups in this world, they’re just playing house, all
poets know that. How does your head feel? How I feel is
what I think. I look at you today, & I expect you to look
the same tomorrow. If you’re having a nervous breakdown, I’m
not going to be looking at you like you’re going to die, because
I don’t think you are. If you’re a woman you put yourself
somewhere near the beginning and then there’s this other place
you put yourself in terms of everybody. “The great cosmetic strangeness
of the normal deep person.” Okay. Those were those people—and
I kept telling myself, I have to be here, because I don’t have
a country. How tight is the string? And what is on this particular
segment of it? And the photographer, being black, and the writer,
me, being white, fell out at this point. And he didn’t want to
look at it—I mean it’s nothing, just some drunk Indians riding
Jersey milk cows—but I wanted to see it, I mean it was right
in front of my eyes and I wanted therefore to look at it.
And death is not any great thing, it’s there or it’s not. I mean
God is the progenitor of religious impetuosity in the human beast.
And Davy Crockett is right on that—I mean he’s gonna shoot a bear,
but he’s not gonna shoot a train, because the train is gonna run
right over him. You can’t shoot the train. And I always thought
there was another way to do that. And it is necessary to do that
and we bear witness that it is necessary to do it. The only distinction
between men and women is five million shits.
Cranston Near the City Line
One clear glass slipper; a slender blue single-rose vase;
one chipped glass Scottie; an eggshell teacup & saucer, tiny,
fragile, but with sturdy handle; a gazelle? the lightest pink flowers
on the teacup, a gold circle, a line really on the saucer; gold
line curving down the handle; glass doors on the cabinet which sat
on the floor & was not too much taller than I; lace doilies? on
the shelves; me serious on the floor, no brother, shiny floor or
shining floor between the flat maroon rug & the glass doors of
the cabinet:
I never told anyone what I knew. Which was that it wasn’t
for anyone else what it was for me.
The piano was black. My eyes were brown. I had rosy
cheeks, every sonofabitch in the world said. I never saw them.
My father came cutting around the corner of the A&P
& diagonally across the lot in a beeline toward our front sidewalk
& the front porch (& the downstairs door); and I could see him, his
long legs, quick steps, nervous, purposeful, coming & passing, combing
his hair, one two three quick wrist flicks that meant “worrying” &
“quickly!”
There were lilacs in the back yard, & dandelions in the lot.
There was a fence.
Pat Dugan used to swing through that lot, on Saturdays, not too tall,
in his brown suit or blue one, white shirt, no tie, soft brown men’s
slippers on his feet, & Grampa! I’d yell & run to meet him &
“Hi! Grampa,” I’d say & he’d swing my arm and be singing his funny
song:
“She told me that she loved me, but
that was yesterday. She told me
that she loved me, & then
she went away!”
I didn’t know it must have been a sad song, for somebody!
He was so jaunty, light in his eyes and laugh lines around
them, it was his happy song, happy with me, it was 1942 or 4,
and he was 53.
An Ex-Athlete, Not Dying
TO STEVE CAREY
& so I took the whole trip
filled with breaths, heady with assurance
gained in all innocence from that self’s
possession of a sure stride, a strong heart,
quick hands, & what one sport would surely describe
as that easy serenity born of seemingly having been
“a quick read.” “He could read the field from before
he even knew what that was.” He was so right. Long before.
It was so true. I postulated the whole thing.
It was the innoce
nce of Second Avenue, of one
who only knew about First. I didn’t win it;
I didn’t buy it; I didn’t bird-dog it; but I didn’t dog it.
I could always hear it, not see it. But I rarely had
to listen hard to it. I sure didn’t have to “bear” it.
I didn’t think, “Later for that.” I knew something,
but I didn’t know that. But I didn’t know,
brilliant mornings, blind in the rain’s rich light,
now able always to find water, that now I would drink.
Coda : Song
When having something to do
but not yet being at it
because I’m alone, because of you
I lay down the book, & pick up the house
& move it around until it is
where it is what it is I am doing
that is the something I had to do
because I’m no longer alone, because of you.
In Anselm Hollo’s Poems
The goddess stands in front of her cave.
The beetle wakes up. The frightened camper watches
The two horsemen. The walking catfish walks by.
The twins are fighting the wind let loose in the dark
To be born again the human animal young in the day’s events.
The laundry-basket lid is still there.
The moving houses are very moving.
The last empress of China
Is receiving the new members of the orchestra
Through two layers of glass in The Empress Hotel.
In the wreck of the cut-rate shoe store the poet can be seen,
Drunk; a monster; the concussed consciousness in
The charge of the beautiful days. The difficulties are great.
The colors must be incredible: it all coheres:
The force of being she releases in him being
The claim of the dimensions of the world.
Postcard from the Sky
You in love with her
read my poems and wonder
what she sees in you.
Last Poem
Before I began life this time
I took a crash course in Counter-Intelligence
Once here I signed in, see name below, and added
Some words remembered from an earlier time,
“The intention of the organism is to survive.”
My earliest, & happiest, memories pre-date WWII,
They involve a glass slipper & a helpless blue rose
In a slender blue single-rose vase: Mine
Was a story without a plot. The days of my years
Folded into one another, an easy fit, in which
I made money & spent it, learned to dance & forgot, gave
Blood, regained my poise, & verbalized myself a place
In Society. 101 St. Mark’s Place, apt. 12A, NYC 10009
New York. Friends appeared & disappeared, or wigged out,
Or stayed; inspiring strangers sadly died; everyone
I ever knew aged tremendously, except me. I remained
Somewhere between 2 and 9 years old. But frequent
Reification of my own experiences delivered to me
Several new vocabularies, I loved that almost most of all.
I once had the honor of meeting Beckett & I dug him.
The pills kept me going, until now. Love, & work,
Were my great happinesses, that other people die the source
Of my great, terrible, & inarticulate one grief. In my time
I grew tall & huge of frame, obviously possessed
Of a disconnected head, I had a perfect heart. The end
Came quickly & completely without pain, one quiet night as I
Was sitting, writing, next to you in bed, words chosen randomly
From a tired brain, it, like them, suitable, & fitting.
Let none regret my end who called me friend.
Small Role Felicity
FOR TOM CLARK
Anselm is sleeping; Edmund is feverish, &
Chatting; Alice doing the Times Crossword Puzzle:
I, having bathed, am pinned, nude, to the bed
Between Green Hills of Africa &
The Pro Football Mystique. Steam is hissing
In the pipes, cold air blowing across my legs. . . .
Tobacco smoke is rising up my nose, as Significance
Crackles & leaps about inside my nightly no-mind.
Already it’s past two, of a night like any other:
O, Old Glory, atop the Empire State, a building, &
Between the Hudson & the East rivers, O, purple, & O, murky black,
If only . . . but O, finally, you, O, Leonardo, you at last arose
Bent, and racked with fit after fit of coughing, & Cursing!
Terrible curses! No Joke! What will happen? Who
be served? Whose call go unanswered? And
Who can 44 down, “Pretender to
The Crown of Georgia?” be . . .
(Boris Pasternak?)
Under the Southern Cross
FOR DICK GALLUP
Peeling rubber all the way up
SECOND AVENUE into Harlem Heights
Our yellow Triumph took us out of Manhattan tenement hells
Into the deer-ridden black earth dairylands.
Corn-fed murderers, COPS, waved us past
Low-slung Frank Lloyd Wright basements. We missed most deer.
You left me in Detroit, for money. In Freeport, Maine, our host
Shotgunned his wife into cold death, who was warm. Fuck him. Scoot
Ferried us to Portland, then leaped out of his life from atop the
UN Building.
Enplaning next to the flatlands, we rubber-stamped our own passports
And in one year changed the face of American Poetry. Hepatitis
felled you
Then on the very steps where the Peace Corps first reared its no-head.
Though it helped pass the long weekends, polygamy unsettled me
considerably
In Ann Arbor, where each day’s mail meant one more lover dead.
My favorite
Elm tree died there as well. But Europe beckoned, and we went, first
Pausing to don the habits of Buffalo, in Buffalo. After that it was
weak pins
& strong needles, but travel truly does broaden. It broadened us,
And we grew fat & famous, or at least I did. You fell
For a Lady from Baltimore near the Arno. Then you fell
Into the Arno. You drowned & kept on drowning; while I, in my
Silver threads, toured the Historical Tate, & mutilated
A well-thought of Blake while England slept.
In Liverpool a Liverpudlian dropped his bottle of milk beneath a
neon light,
Smashing it to smithereens. The sidewalk white with milk made us cry.
And so we left. Back in the USA, on crutches, we acquired ourselves
a wife
For 12 goats and a matched pair of Arabian thoroughbreds picked up
on a whim
From a rug-peddler in Turkestan. God knows what we gave to him.
Now I’m living in New York City once again, gone grey, and mostly
stay in bed
While you are pacing your floor in Baltimore. But we aren’t “back”
yet, not
By a long shot. Oh No! This trip doesn’t end
Until we drop off our yellow Triumph somewhere still far away
From where we are now. No, this ain’t it yet.
There’s black coffee & glazed donuts still due us, bubba,
At a place called The Jesse James Cafe. So, hit it. Let’s burn rubber.
TIMES CRITIC DESPISES CURRENT PLAY, a Post reports.
Dangling from it, in the wind, his body gently sways.
Come on, floor this Mother! Whoops! Don’t hit that lonely old
grubber.
THE MORNING LINE
FOR ALICE
Sonnet: Homage to Ron
Back to dawn by police word
to sprinkle it
Over the lotions that change
On locks
To sprinkle I say
In funny times
The large pig at which the intense cones beat
So the old fat flies toward the brain
Under the sun and the rain
So we are face to face
again
Nothing in these drawers
Which is terror to the idiot
& the non-idiot alike. No?
44th Birthday Evening, at Harris’s
Nine stories high Second Avenue
On the roof there’s a party
All the friends are there watching
By the light of the moon the blazing sun
Go down over the side of the planet
To light up the underside of Earth
There are long bent telescopes for the friends
To watch this through. The friends are all in shadow.
I can see them from my bed inside my head.
44 years I’ve loved these dreams today.
17 years since I wrote for the first time a poem
On my birthday, why did I wait so long?
my land a good land
its highways go to many good places where
many good people were found: a home land, whose song comes up
from the throat of a hummingbird & it ends
where the sun goes to across the skies of blue.
I live there with you.
An UnSchneeman
I appear in the kitchen
duffle-bag in left hand.
“Anybody here?” I say. You
hearing me from the front room,
“Hi. How was it?” “Any pepsi?”
I say hopefully. “No.” “Well,
Central Washington was Out of the
Question!, but you are now looking
at The Complete Toast of Guam!” “You
were gone Forever!”
A Quiet Dream
Will the little girl outside
reading this
writing
being written
by a man
inside
Now
moving easily