The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (51 page)

TO DICK GALLUP

People of the future

while you are reading these poems, remember

you didn’t write them
,

I did
.

I have been here too many times before

you & now it’s time to go

crazy again will that make you like me? I think so

often about you & all those bon aperitifs we had

wanted to have but didn’t in Paris where we

never got to did we No we didn’t although now

Here I am & everyone loves me so

where are you? & why don’t they go

away? I didn’t ask for this I asked for you

love but you said No, you didn’t say

May I? true & crazy here I am

again unkempt in my passion at that May I?

TO DAVID BEARDEN

Don’t call me “Berrigan”

Or “Edmund”

If ever you touch me

Rivers of annoyance undermine the arrangements

If you would own me

Spit

The broken eggshell of morning

A proper application

Of stately rhythms

Timing

Accessible to adepts

All

May pierce this piercing wind

Penetrate this light

To hide my shadow

But the recoil

Not death but to mount the throne

Mountains of twine and

Entangling moments

Which is why I send you my signal

That is why I give you this six-gun and call you “Steve”

Have you taken the measure of the wind?

Can hands touch, and

Must we dispose of “the others”?

He wandered and kept on wandering. Bar-Mitzvah

and Confirmation availed themselves of his myriad

aimless impulses. It was no use. Days were of

cheeseburgers, shoe repair, and scary. In cities

and through frenzy darkness was far away. Darkness,

you are so dark, he thought. Where oh where is a

telephone booth, and the friendliness of newsprint

on Saturday afternoons at the Stadium? He wept. Steamy

ferns made a dank obbligato to his dreams. It grew and grew.

At last he was surrounded by gaily-colored birds,

who sang to him in the key of G or E. It was

then he smiled, for always, affirmation made him happy.

Later he died of Hatred.

My rooms were full of Ostrich feathers when

I returned from Spring, and someone had stolen

all the apricot brie! just as if they’d known

I was in training! for shame! that anyone

could be so cruel, and me with only 27 teeth!

How fortunate they never found dear

you. For surely then they would have planted

crickets, to lick the cherry glue off of all

my Princess Grace Special Delivery airmail stamps. The boors,

they’d stop at nothing. But this time their

saboteurs slipped up. I’ll never let them find you,

no matter what they do, you, my secret weapon, who

assures my victories! I’m so glad we were married

in Hooversville, Ohio, in 1933!

Why have you billowed under my ancient piazza

Father? “I swan, if you don’t beat everything

Anybody ever heard tell of !” Refreshment time!

Have a nonpareil? Thank you! Here we are again

In the movies and I’m holding your thigh, Mmmmmmmmmm

Feels like “a belly” to me. “Well, I declare, Feety-

Belle, ain’t you ever gonna get y’rself a real . . . Shut your face

Angerbelle, you ain’t doin’ s’hot y’rself y’know,

my stars!” (At intermission I called her at the hotel

And she made a big thing about somebody telling her

“I’m Judy Garland’s daughter.”) When you’re 7 or 8 or 9

You don’t really care who your momma and poppa are,

Just so they really love you and have TV and all that.

Up in the blue window a white woman is reeling out her laundry.

Rilke,

I strain to gather my absurdities

Into a symbol. I falter. These

Roisterers here assembled shatter my zest

With festivity.

Once again I turn to you, to your

Buch das Bildung
. Oh Tall Tree

In the self

Flower we three into one.

May he who is you

Become me.

At last I’m a real poet I’ve written a

ballade a sonnet a poem in spontaneous

prose and even a personal poem     I can use

punctuation or not and it doesn’t

matter      I’m obscure when I feel like it

especially in my dream poems which I never even

call     Dream Poem      but from sheer cussedness title

Match Game Etc. (for Dick Gallup) or something like that.

For example, take this poem, I don’t know how

to end it, It needs six lines to make it a sonnet, I

could just forget it and play hearts with Joe and

Pat and Dick, but lately I’m always lethargic,

and I don’t even like hearts, or Pat, or Joe, or

Dick or / and especially myself, & this is no help.

Dear Marge, hello. It is 5:15 a.m.

Outside my room atonal sounds of rain

Drum in the pre-dawn. In my skull my brain

Aches in rhythm to that pounding morning rain.

In your letter, many questions. I read

Them over and over. And now I dread

Answering. “Deteriorating,” you said.

Not a question, really, but you did

Say it. And made it hard to write. You know

Margie, tonight, and every night, in any

Season, cold images glitter brightly

In my head. Dreams of Larry Walker

In his marriage bed: of David Bearden

Paranoid: and of Martin Cochran, dead.

In the ear, winds dance

to drink in the house

Summer came over here today

Everyone overloads one song

Is he the handsome stranger?

I’m thinking of summoning people

I need a hoodlum in white

“kill him”

This face against its own

Endows

giggling

And forms a road upon a tract

I got so tall up there

He t-told me “you’re too fallow in your footsteps”

Goodbye to burning

Brain

Heat

These feet drifting on an unangry tide

Please turn stark naked.

You can make this swooped transition on your lips

Go to the sea, the lake, the tree

And the dog days come

Your head spins when the old bull rushes

Back in the aery daylight, he was not a midget

He could feel the talk sidling up into his ears and burning

His stand-in was named Herman, but came rarely

Why do you begin to yawn so soon, who seemed

So hard, feather-bitten . . . back in the aery daylight

Put away your hair. The black heart beside the 15 pieces of glass

Spins when the old bull rushes. The words say
I LOVE YOU
:

Go to the sea, the lake, the tree,

Glistering, bristling, cozzening whatever disguises

AFTER RILKE

Lord, it is time. Summer was very great.

Now cast your shadow upon sundials.

Let winds remind meadows it is late.

Mellow now the last fruits on the vine.

Allow them only two more southern days.

Hasten them to fulness, and press

The last heavy sweetness through the wine.

Who has no home can not build now.

Who dwells alone must now remain alone;

Will waken, read, write long letters, and

Will wander restlessly when leaves are blowing.

Lester Young! why are you playing that clarinet

you know you are Horn in my head? the middle page is

missing god damn it now how will I ever understand Nature

And New Painting? doo doot doo Where is Dick Gallup

his room is horrible it has books in it and paint peeling

a 1934 icebox living on the fifth floor it’s

ridiculous

yes and it’s ridiculous to be sitting here

in New York City 28 years old wife sleeping and

Lester playing the wrong sound in 1936 in Kansas City (of

all places) sounding like Benny Goodman (of all people) but

a good sound, not a surprise, a voice, & where was Billie, he

hadn’t met her yet, I guess Gallup wasn’t born yet neither was

my wife Just me & that icebox I hadn’t read
HORN
by John

Clellon Holmes yet, either

What is rhythm I wonder? Which was George & which Ira

Gershwin? Why

don’t I do more? wanting only to be walking in the New

York Autumn

warm from coffee I still can feel gurgling under my ribs

climbing the steps of the only major statement in New York City

(Louis Sullivan) thinking the poem I am going to write seeing

the fountains come on wishing I were he

Joy! you come winging in a hot wind on the breath

of happy sexy music, you are peeping

into my redbloodedness, and I am writing silly lines

like, “I was born, reared, and educated in Tulsa,

Oklahoma,” only true of Ron Padgett and not Dan’l Boone or me

Uh-huh a sip of gritty coffee, ripping me out of

my mind, making me feel “funny” is carrying me uptown

past interesting bodegas, the interesting

bums eyeing me, my beard throws them off

tho I’m yearning for a little romance

Dontcha think it’s time? thanks & your name is

walking right by my side it hurts me to see you talking

to any other guy! where is Harry Fainlight, he’s on a trip

Now that’s integrity! Where’s Andy Warhol? Far out, but Harry

doesn’t think so he prefers Vaughan Traherne Wordsworth even

Who can help but love him? it’s so American of him! Lines,

you must be saying what I mean I hope I like you later. Our

Love must be sweet destiny, no other love could thrill me so

completely (unless it be going to the movies, and alone, crossing

the Mississippi for the first time, so rare

a feat for feet “born, reared and educated in Tulsa, Oklahoma”

turned blue with cold and being careful not to touch one another.)

1.

My rooms were full of awful features when

I was burning, dear, and you were eating goblets

of ruinous dinner! It didn’t matter, tho. The

foolish wind kept blowing, and my bones were humming!

That was when my eyes walked out

on to bleak piers and shrieked for you! You were standing, often,

stark-naked just as if you knew it wasn’t raining

and no-one had stolen all the dazzling looks. But this

one time the saboteurs sneaked up! Hah! I didn’t

let them grind you, my little Coolie-Baby, who insures

my factory. No, and it’s not bad to lay buried, in Hooversville,

by wires, laid on us by gentlemen, & ladies flushed

with gin. Except at night, when you are lying in the wind.

2.

I beat on the fruits of the gushy showers

burning up ginger-ale, only a pantomime mother &

father, doting on feelable widows, as my rent & these

urgent denials in my plug-ugly vision hold out! I

would take some corn to Minton’s & throw it on Dizzy

Gillespie, & I mumble at babies on the bus, although

I too am reading the nickel journals, while my axles

are losing patience. Castles! my dearest, the whole town