The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan
Page 29
the full moon: a friend to man
pineapples: heavy
having no wants, quite content: chatty
the power of slowly moving jaws: camp
exquisite: available night & day
critical, marking and epoch: straight
And Into Glory Peep: just for the hell of it.
Paul Blackburn
dying now, or already dead
hello. It’s only Ted, interrupting
in case I hadn’t said, as clearly
as I’d have it said, Paul,
I hear you, do. Crossing Park Avenue
South; 4:14 a.m.; going West at
23rd; September 1st, 1971.
Tom Clark
I take him
purely as treasure
His exquisite pain
pinpoints my evasive pleasure.
Don’t think him to be
Any more than you see
& Don’t be beastly
to him. If you do
he’ll let you see him
seeing you:
& you’ll wake up hating yourself
for hating him.
You will.
Kirsten
you’re so funny! I’d give you
all of my money, anytime,
just to see what you’d say!
alas, all I have is a dime.
How you talk is my heart’s
delight. You are
more terrible than your step-dad,
more great than bright light.
Chicago April Morning: Snow
Anne,
A Happy Birthday, late, to you,
Never less than great to us, great
Light and air in our lives, that bus
Whose windows look always to you, so straight
so true;
love;
Ted
Brigadoon
FOR BILL BERKSON
1.
“This mushroom walks in.”
2.
“And one cannot go back except in time.”
3.
“Nothing is gained by assurance as to what is insecure.”
4.
“I have a machine-gun trained on Scotland Yard.”
5.
“The body sends out self to repel non-self.”
6.
“I can get close & still stay outside.”
7.
“See the why, knowing what: the clear enigma.”
8.
“a fragrant flowered shrub blush a clean tantrum.”
This Perfect Day
Six months of each other
Evoke the birth throes
This primitive magnetic expression of the heads
Above all the hypnotic presence of staring eyes that have
a ritualistic fixity
Against the broad arcs whose force not only cuts wildly
Into a jungle of coarse energies
But whose fury is substituted for the rigorous control
of eye & intellect
So a penchant for the grotesque is hardly absent
This perfect day.
The Green Sea
Above his head clanged
Turning
And there were no dreams
in this sleep
Over this table.
Mi Casa, Su Casa
FOR LEWIS MACADAMS
my crib your crib
the interior burns I read
white palm over the coffee can
in the quiet
a manual
of gentle but determined practices
“I want human to begin with”
A small voice walks across the grey empty room.
He
He never listened while friends talked. He worked
steadily to the even current of sound; but if a note
of distress were struck he was aware of it at once.
Like a wireless operator with a novel open in front
of him, he could disregard every signal except the
ship’s symbol and the S.O.S. He could even work better
when they talked than when they were silent, for so long
as his ear-drum registered those tranquil sounds—their
deep gossip, comments on the sermons preached by one
another, plots of new movies, even commentaries on and complaints
about the weather—he knew that all was well. It was
silence that stopped him working—silence in which he might
look up and see terror waiting in their eyes for
his attention.
7 Things I Do in the Hotel Chelsea
Rain or Shine:
dig it: the solitude of
someone
Call for Company Men
& Women
to become
at the very least
visible
in all of our daily lives.
Name one possible man: Jim
One possible woman: Maggie May, or
at least,
maybe
Gather ye rosebuds, gimmicks,
Crystal,
Schmee,
make-up
the necessary Will
to insist on Grace
from time to time, at
your place
where light in waves
thru motes of dust
lends all your combinations
lust: this
ardor to
Believe in Now as the noun it is
when “why not”
hits this town:
“that’s your given prerogative,
son”
We all do something; it goes
without saying; you
do it.
It got done.
Communism
Red Air
& I can hear the red bus
sing
Morning has broken
meticulously
labelled the East Wing is fossils
sinister habits antiques
in fact a pleasant park
a government department
bulbs
birth
severe abundance swirlings
The most
spectacular object
in it
a great
shining
prolific
automatic
electric
churchyard
map-maker
mute
flickering
imagination
bejewelled
coarse
display
the euphonious person
in hey-day
wholesomeness
taken
over-large
fuses
With a little lantern above
A sort of canopy
pitched within a room
architecture
Church
with the exception of
One steel office building
A cold violent backside to you
A little saucer dome
imp anonymity
little plateaus in various arms
Swallower of former designs
true stone fan virile shadow
functional sinews of mood & tempo of
ballcourt
COFFEE
Square bracketing vision bubble dome
Central Presences Naked in the Shroud:
Sensible in the air
bronze pedestrian tree-ape
grace-note
the dizzying staircase
non-euphonious personal
disguise.
Sandy’s Sunday Best
It’s made of everything, slow
stains & flash
You can see, for example,
green, past enchantment
& trees wave in passing
Even the children today are smart
& not just more people
Look!<
br />
Strolling, sassy, dashing, brilliant!
The whole world turns, to see
nods, interminably its head
Cool black cats, super white stars
will dance all night in that wake!
Of three minutes of sunlight.
Aubade
Last night
before retiring,
one of those brain-spasms
I guess all poets must have
prompted me to write
in my bedside
notebook
which, incidentally
is blue, and shaped like
a Regular Grind
MAXWELL HOUSE
Coffee can
these words:
“I advance Dagwood Bumstead as
the pre-eminent philosopher of our time.”
This morning,
I awakened to the startling
realization that
overnight I had become transformed
into the person
of that noble & decent man,
“Dr. Watson.” For good.
Service at Upwey
Over Belle Vue Road that silence said
To mean an angel is passing overhead.
Anselm’s round head framed peering in the garden door
Four & ½ hours before, I didn’t hear
The doorbell ring—7:30 a.m. Greenwich Summer Time—
Announcing the arrival
Of the celebrated Greek-American Poet
from Chicago: John Paul! Was that
An Alice or a Mabel who let him in?
First to visit us
In Wonderful Wivenhoe, where
Once smugglers ran amok, smuggling
What? and now Alice goes out
To shoppe.
“I have only one work, & I hardly know what it is!”
My baby throws my shoes through the door.
Baby-talk woke up the world, today
little Anselm,
Alice, Mabel,
& John Paul.
& me writing it down here.
This page has ashes on it
Baltic Stanzas
Less original than
penetrating
very often
illuminating
has taken us
300 years
to recover from
the disaster of
The White Mountain
O Manhattan!
O Saturday afternoons!
you were a room
& the room cried, “love!”
I was a stove, & you
in cement were a dove
Ah, well, thanks for the shoes, god
I wear them on my right feet
since that bright winter when
rapt in your colors, O heat!
how we lay long on your orange bed
sipping iced white wine, & not thinking
the blue sky changed blues while we were drinking
Next day god said, “Hitler has to get hit on the head.”
Other Contexts
I’d been
trying
to escape
that mind game
thinking that thought
itself
can possess
the world
by always & I mean
as constantly as physically
possible
lying down and
not thinking it over. Reading
for example everything I’d loved
again & again
anything new:
resisting being thought.
Exactly. Resisting
Being
Thought.
Tonight I think to do
differently, differently
to do.
I think I will.
I would
think I will. We’ll have to wait
& see. I have to wait,
and see
My watch shows it to be
5:51 a.m., March the 24th
in Wivenhoe, in England.
Alice is asleep
& breathing beside me, pregnantly.
& oh yes, it’s 1974. Alice
is 28 years old. Anselm is 20 months.
I’m coming up on four-oh.
A Religious Experience
I was looking at the words he
was saying. . . .like. . . Okinawa. . . .
bandage. . . real. . . form. . . and suddenly
I realized I had read somewhere that,
“in their language the word for ‘idiot’
is also the word meaning ‘to breathe through
your mouth.’” And I was simply left there,
in bed, being looked at.
Crossroads
The pressure’s on, old son.
We’re going to salvage just about all you got.
It’s the way you’ve been going about it
that’s worried us.
All this remote control business.
Where’s the Doctor?
I am the Doctor.
You’ll find the patient’s files
in these cabinets.
Is everything ready for surgery?
You don’t need a sauna to get heated up
here.
Isn’t it funny to have lived in the midlands
all this time
& not seen all these lovely things about?
He believes if he’s hard enough on somebody
they’ll give way.
Well, I’m the principal shareholder,
& I’m taking my equities out!
I’m also staying right here with you.
Right. & I’m going with you.
New Personal Poem
TO MICHAEL LALLY
You had your own reasons for getting
In your own way. You didn’t want to be
Clear to yourself. You knew a hell
Of a lot more than you were willing
to let yourself know. I felt
Natural love for you on the spot. R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Right.
Beautiful. I don’t use the word lightly. I
Protested with whatever love (honesty) (& frontal nudity)
A yes basically reserved Irish Catholic American Providence Rhode
Island New Englander is able to manage. You
Are sophisticated, not uncomplicated, not
Naive, and Not simple. An Entertainer, & I am, too.
Frank O’Hara respected love, so do you, & so do we.
He was himself & I was me. And when we came together
Each ourselves in Iowa, all the way
That was love, & it still is, love, today. Can you see me
In what I say? Because as well I see you know
In what you have to say, I did love Frank, as I do
You, “in the right way”.
That’s just talk, not Logos,
a getting down to cases:
I take it as simple particulars that
we wear our feelings on our faces.
Elysium
FOR MARION FARRIER
It’s impossible to look at it
Without the feeling as of
Being welcomed, say, to Paris
After a long boring train ride,
For women are like that:
They make one feel
he has travelled a long way
just being there.
And so well might he take
what comes, come
to what it is takes him.
Blue Targets
You see a lot
of white when you’re
looking at her eyes,
She’s so quick toward
either side
but when
you look straight
down
into her, it’s
thru & at targets,
reflecting, blue.
Reading Frank O’Hara
Reading Frank O’Hara you
you know you can’t feel
any worse than he felt,
so
hell,
why not be exuberant!
In the 51st State
IN THE 51ST STATE
Allen Ginsberg’s “Shining City”
FOR ALICE
But that dream. . . oh, hell!
maybe, like Jack, just drink muscatel!
But that won’t work. A “Pharmacia”
is where you get your pills. “Shining
City.” & in its space & time one can find
a “Position inferior to Language.” & occupy
beautiful, discrete, & almost ordinary
Places.—But that won’t work. . . .
. . . .that dream. . . “oh, Hell!”
In the 51st State
FOR KATE
The life I have led
being an easy one
has made suicide
impossible, no?
Everything arrived
in fairly good time;
women, rolls, medicine
crime—poor health
like health
has been an inspiration.
When all else fails I read the magazines.
Criticism like a trombone used as a gate
satisfies some hinges, but not me.
I like artists who rub their trumpets with maps
to clean them, the trumpets or the maps.
I personally took
33 years to discover
that blowing your nose is necessary sometimes
even tho it is terrifying. (not aesthetic).
I’d still rather brindle.
I wasn’t born in this town
but my son, not the one born in Chicago,
not the one born in England, not
the one born in New England, in fact, my daughter
was. She looks like her brother by another mother
and like my brother, too.
Her forehead shines like the sun
above freckles and I had mine
and I have more left.
I read only the books you find in libraries or drugstores
or at Marion’s. Harris loans me Paul Pines’
to break into poetry briefly.
Au revoir.
(I wouldn’t translate that
as “Goodbye” if I were you.)
A woman rolls under the wheels in a book.