The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (12 page)

doing but feeling a little better

standing on the hood of a 1953 Buick

with a John Henry type hammer

in his hands, they having a kind of

metric as he adjusts his delivery more and

more to the inevitable banging. Presumes

there is nothing unscientific in

his desire to change the best

proportions of strength and beauty. His

tastes were modest, a piece of bread,

a draught of water, and you were

often sent to drive him out of his

college. “I couldn’t believe you’d

be the one I was looking for,” the poet

says in another city, where he has

a friend he can stay with a day or two.

He flies in watching the lights of the

city, and in a phrase the losses endured

by everyone every day—the negation of

possibility that occurs each time

we pass anyone’s house.

He eats dinner with the writing and the

phrases stay with him when he wakes.

He notes them down and moves on to the

next stop via the bus station. Crossing

the campus on the one path he

knows he keeps reminding himself of

what he is doing. It is ominous that

the only other large institution in

the town is

the state insane asylum. In all, it

is a strangely good occasion.

He leaves that night, paces back and forth.

There is a skull on his table and suddenly

at the sight of it he starts reading.

From the airless close-packed winter bus

station he tries to call his contact at

the noon reading. The tour is to take place that

day and he has four hours to go 40 miles. The

tenuous noise of revolutions and

student demonstrations combine with assembly

lines that will annihilate the miles,

he becoming then an older and more

dependable self, and yet, remembering.

Perhaps though some recent poems about

his children will do the trick. He reads

these quietly and has

inevitable parties given after his

readings, he plays one or two songs,

and then scuttles back into his corner,

realizing now that role-playing is

shameful beside the feelings he

has experienced. Now he has the sensation

that he must calm down and work.

But on the aircraft aimed at last at

his home, he feels also

interested in Yeats’ occult preoccupations,

a curious object to discuss

in good health, far from the poems themselves.

“Just be yourself,” he told himself

in the beginning. Ah, but

what self? The self develops a full-

blown psychosis. Delusions set in,

along with restlessness; a sensation of

suffocation, withdrawal, excitation, satisfaction,

that he has done the something

idiosyncratic that people are expecting and

that much more, too.

It is more than he wants to pay, and, caught

up by a daring all or nothing plan,

he wants to tell, he does tell the driver to

take him to the high car, thinking

of the open road, the dear love of

comrades, Hart Crane. The long trip

back. He is instantly surrounded.

Someone points him in a direction

and he begins walking with students

trailing him as though he is uncomfortable,

even desperate: he is

sure he has not written any poetry that

would turn him around.

It begins to snow. Traffic

slows all around

him for miles. Finally a lucky kind of

exhilaration has come over him

and he sings with

white breath to the passing hours, followed by

complete recovery the next day.

He pulls out the packet of schedules:

something is wrong. He has forgotten

that his after-words are being received almost

as things, and toward the end he comes to

think that the things have the quality of a

college, but cannot reach him. He hails a

cab and asks the fare to the town he is going

to with a certain condescending benevolence,

and begins.

It is over. He relaxes with the

faculty party and goes to bed.

He dreams he is a scarecrow in a field

and writes poems

in his head all night. Some few

believe he is where he is: some place in

Wisconsin, where he has given a

poetry reading at a small college; he

has never been lionized by anyone,

not even his immediate family; but

these small repeated tastes of local

mints continue; he bellows louder and

louder and the flinching

audience is with him to the end of a couple

of things modelled on Walter Benton’s

“This is my Beloved.”

If they were good, and he read them well,

he could collect his money at

each stop with a clear

conscience. An hour goes by. He considers various

alternatives, but they are all

as absurd as the wish to grow

wings. Besides, another hammering is going on.

When an especially loud cheer comes in from

outside he looks up, thinking, “What is wrong

with such and such a concept?” Students

gather round him afterwards, pressing

their manuscripts into his hands,

telling him that the college he is to read in that

night is denominational. He goes up to the

priest, who has been in fact pointing to the right

direction all along. Remember now? He is now standing

alone in the snow, in a strange state, hitch-hiking.

He is 45 years old. For better or for

worse he has been moving and speaking among his kind.

But it is he who is not satisfied with this.

Remember the fragrance of Grandma’s kitchen? It is not

only poetry that is

involved, it is the poet as well. Vastly he resolves

to see if he can work something out

about this later, on the bus, at a reasonable hour.

He rides calmly back to a city within a

city, with a certain flair now, since he has forgotten

to telegraph his arrival. No one meets him at the

airport, he phones a friend in the city for a day

and a night before flying home. He sees the

people who sponsored as much liquor as he is

accustomed to at a party after the reading,

waves his arms wildly about and says, “Anything

amounts to something!” And, looking at his watch, he

turns it one way and another so his thin hands can catch

the keys. He has not played the

guitar for years but feels immediately

all out and looks around for whoever is

supposed to help him. There is no one

but a priest, and finally it happens.

One of them, a girl, not the one he would

have picked to pen such a thing, is already

half an hour late. They all reach

the college, then the building, a crowd-raising

scheme by some clod or other.

All through the reading all sorts of new and

poetic things happen to him. Each time he carries

it to another campus. At a turn he gets off

his freeway; they are not so far from the

college as they thought but he

was not gracefully but disgracefully

drunk, who is now halfway into a new frankness.

“I couldn’t believe in you, either,” says the

priest with candor. Riveting him with

astonishment, directly in front of the

building, a lanky student comes out of the

building and talks to him an hour or two before

dinner. He lies down on a bed, then gets up,

is finished. He finds his poems,

usually rather loose in rhythm, taking

on a thumping thunderment and

incoherent babbling. These symptoms lasted

several decades. Actually they have been

responded to to a degree he has come to

consider excessive and even manic, but he

suspects that attendance at college seems to

be all but inaccessible. There are no

buses or trains until after time confers her

particular favors on a stranger she

will never see again, one who last night

grew more emotional, more harried, more

impulsive. Yet he knows that these qualities

will die out, take a wrong turn somewhere.

On a highway complex as big as this one

it is hard to get tween his touring self and

his usual self. He has definitely been

another person.

TO ANNE KEPLER & FRANK O’HARA

FOR SANDY

Winter crisp and the brittleness of snow

as like make me tired as not. I go my

myriad ways blundering, bombastic, dragged

by a self that can never be still, pushed

by my surging blood, my reasoning mind.

I am in love with poetry. Every way I turn

this, my weakness, smites me. A glass

of chocolate milk, head of lettuce, darkness

of clouds at one o’clock obsess me.

I weep for all of these or laugh.

By day I sleep, an obscurantist, lost

in dreams of lists, compiled by my self

for reassurance. Jackson Pollock     René

Rilke       Benedict Arnold      I watch

my psyche, smile, dream wet dreams, and sigh.

At night, awake, high on poems, or pills

or simple awe that loveliness exists, my lists

flow differently. Of words bright red

and black, and blue.         Bosky.     Oubliette.     Dissevered.

And O, alas

Time disturbs me. Always minute detail

fills me up. It is 12:10 in New York. In Houston

it is 2 p.m. It is time to steal books. It’s

time to go mad. It is the day of the apocalypse

the year of parrot fever! What am I saying?

Only this. My poems do contain

wilde beestes. I write for my Lady

of the Lake. My god is immense, and lonely

but uncowed. I trust my sanity, and I am proud. If

I sometimes grow weary, and seem still, nevertheless

my heart still loves, will break.

I wake up 11:30 back aching from soft bed Pat

gone to work Ron to class (I never heard a sound)

it’s my birthday. 27. I put on birthday

pants birthday shirt go to
ADAM
’s buy a Pepsi for

breakfast come home drink it take a pill

I’m high!

I do three Greek lessons to make

up for cutting class. I read birthday book

(from Joe) on Juan Gris real name: José

Vittoriano Gonzalez stop in the middle read

all my poems gloat a little over new ballad

quickly skip old sonnets imitations of Shakespeare.

Back to books. I read poems by Auden Spenser Stevens

Pound and Frank O’Hara. I hate books.

I wonder

if Jan or Helen or Babe ever think about me. I

wonder if David Bearden still dislikes me. I wonder

if people talk about me secretly. I wonder if

I’m too old. I wonder if I’m fooling myself

about pills. I wonder what’s in the icebox.

I wonder if Ron or Pat bought any toilet paper

this morning

FOR JOHN STANTON

It is 7:53 Friday morning in the Universe

New York City to be somewhat exact

I’m in my room wife gone working Gallup

fucking in the room below

had 17½ milligrams desoxyn

last night 1 Miltown, read Paterson, parts

1 & 2, poems by Wallace Stevens & How Much Longer

Shall I Be Able To Inhabit The Divine Sepulchre

(John Ashbery). Made lists of lines to

steal, words to look up (didn’t). Had steak & eggs

with Dick while Sandy sweetly slept.

At 6:30 woke Sandy

fucked til 7 now she’s late to work & I’m still

high. Guess I’ll write to Bernie today

and Tom. And call Tony. And go out at 9 (with Dick)

to steal books to sell, so we can go

to see
A NIGHT AT THE OPERA

It’s 5:03 a.m. on the 11th of July this morning

and the day is bright gray turning green      I can’t stop

loving you says Ray Charles    and I know exactly

what he means because the Swedish policeman in the

next room is beating on my door demanding sleep

and not Ray Charles and bluegrass     does he know

that in three hours I go to court to see if the world

will let me have a wife     he doesn’t of course it wouldn’t

occur to him      nor would it occur to him to write

“scotch-tape body” in a notebook but it did occur to

John Stanton alias The Knife Fighter age 18 so why

are my hands shaking I should know better