The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (6 page)

Of polytonic breezes gathering in the gathering winds

Mysterious Billy Smith a fantastic trigger

Of a plush palace shimmering velvet red

The cherrywood romances of rainy cobblestones

A dark trance

In the trembling afternoon

On the green a white boy goes

We may read about all those radio waves

And he walks. Three ciphers and a faint fakir

For the fey Saint’s parade       Today

No        One         Two       Three        Four       Today

Under a sky of burnt umber we bumble to

Forget        Bring the green boy white ways

As so we all must in the green jungle

Winds flip down the dark path of breath

The mien florist’s to buy green nosegays

Passage       the treasure         Gomangani

I thought about all those radio waves

Keats was a baiter of bears

Who died of lust      (You lie!   You lie!)

And the wind goes there

Go fly a kite he writes

Who cannot escape his own blue hair

who storms to the big earth and is not absent-minded

& Who dumbly begs a key       & who cannot pay his way

Racing down the blue lugubrious rainway

day brakes and night is a quick pick-me-up

Rain is a wet high harried face

To walk is wet hurried high safe and game

Tiny bugs flit from pool to field and light on every bulb

Whose backs hide doors down round wind-tunnels

He is an umbrella. . . .

Many things are current

Simple night houses rain

Standing pat in the breathless blue air.

On the 15th day of November in the year of the motorcar

Between Oologah and Pawnee

A hand is writing these lines

In a roomful of smoky man names burnished dull black

Southwest, lost doubloons rest, no comforts drift

On dream smoke down the sooted fog ravine

In a terrible Ozark storm the Tundra vine

Blood ran like muddy inspiration: Walks he in around anyway

The slight film has gone to gray-green children

And seeming wide night. Now night

Is a big drink of waterbugs        Then were we so fragile

Honey scorched our lips

On the 15th day of November in the year of the motorcar

Between Oologah and Pawnee

Mud on the first day (night, rather

I was thinking of Bernard Shaw, of sweet May Morris

Do you want me to take off my dress?

Some Poems!

the aeroplane waiting to take you on your first

getting used to using each other

Cowboys!       and banging on my sorrow, with books

The Asiatics

believed in tree spirits, a tall oak, swans gone in the rain,

a postcard of Juan Gris        not a word

Fell on the floor         how strange       to be gone in a minute

I came to you by bus          to be special for us

The bellboy         letters         a key        then to hear from an old stranger

The Gift:         they will reside in Houston following the Grand Canyon.

ONE SONNET FOR DICK

This excitement to be all of night, Henry!

Elvis Peering-Eye danced with Carol Clifford, high,

Contrived whose leaping herb edifies Kant! I’ll bust!

Smile! “Got rye in this’n?”

Widow Dan sold an eye t’meander an X. Whee! Yum!

Pedant tore her bed! Tune, hot! Full cat saith why foo?

“Tune hot full cat?” “No! nexus neck ink!

All moron (on) while “weighed in fur” pal! “Ah’m Sun!”

Dayday came to get her daddy. “Daddy,”

Saith I to Dick in the verge, (In the Verge!)

And “gee” say I, “Easter” “fur” “few tears” “Dick!”

My Carol now a Museum! “O, Ma done fart!” “Less full

Cat,” she said, “One’s there!” “Now cheese, ey?”

“Full cat wilted, bought ya a pup!” “So, nose excitement?”

Andy Butt was drunk in the Parthenon

Bar. If only the Greeks were a band-

Aid, he thought. Then my woe would not flow

O’er the land. He considered his honeydew

Hand. “O woe, woe!” saith Andrew, “a fruit

In my hand may suffice to convey me to Greece,

But I must have envy to live! A grasshopper,

George, if you please!” The bartender sees

That our Andrew’s awash on the sofa

Of wide melancholy. His wound he refurbishes

Stealthily shifty-eyed over the runes. “Your

Trolleycar, sir,” ’s said to Andy, “you bloody

Well emptied the Parthenon!” “A fruitful vista

This Our South,” laughs Andrew to his Pa,

But his rough woe slithers o’er the Land.

to gentle, pleasant strains

just homely enough

to be beautiful

in the dark neighborhoods of my own sad youth

i fall in love.    once

seven thousand feet over one green schoolboy summer

i dug two hundred graves,

laughing, “Put away your books! Who shall speak of us

when we are gone? Let them wear scarves

in the once a day snow, crying in the kitchen

of my heart!” O my love, I will weep a less bitter truth,

till other times, making a minor repair,

a breath of cool rain in those streets

clinging together with slightly detached air.

Now she guards her chalice in a temple of fear

Calm before a storm. Yet your brooding eyes

Or acquiescence soon cease to be answers.

And your soft, dark hair, a means of speaking

Becomes too much to bear. Sometimes,

In a rare, unconscious moment,

Alone this sudden darkness in a toybox

Christine’s classic beauty, Okinawa

To Laugh (Autumn gone, and Spring a long way

Off )        is loving you

When need exceeds means,

I read the Evening World / the sports,

The funnies, the vital statistics, the news:

Okinawa was a John Wayne movie to me.

Into the closed air of the slow

Now she guards her chalice in a temple of fear

Each tree stands alone in stillness

to gentle, pleasant strains

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

Andy Butt was drunk in the Parthenon

Harum-scarum haze on the Pollock streets

This excitement to be all of night, Henry!

Ah, Bernie, to think of you alone, suffering

It is such a good thing to be in love with you

On the green a white boy goes

He’s braver than I, brother

Many things are current, and of these the least are

not always children

On the 15th day of November in the year of the motorcar

And then one morning to waken perfect-faced

To the big promise of emptiness

In a terrible Ozark storm

Pleasing John Greenleaf Whittier!

Speckled marble bangs against his soiled green feet

And each sleeping son is broke-backed and dumb

In fever and sleep processional

Voyages harass the graver

And grope underneath the most serious labor

Darius feared the boats. Meanwhile

John Greenleaf Whittier was writing. Meanwhile

Grandma thought wistfully of international sock fame

Down the John G. Whittier Railroad Road

In the morning sea mouth

The blue day! In the air winds dance

Now our own children are strangled down in the bubbling

quadrangle.

To thicken! He felt his head

Returning past the houses he passed

“Goodbye, Bernie!”         “Goodbye, Carol!”       “Goodbye, Marge!”

Davy Crockett was nothing like Jesse James

A farmer drove up on a tractor

He said he was puzzled by the meaning exactly of “block.”

The blue day! Where else can we go

To escape from our tedious homes, and perhaps recapture

the past?

Now our own children are returning past the houses

I sit at my dust-patterned desk littered with four month

dust

The air beginning to thicken

In the square, on the farm, in my white block hair

Où sont les neiges des neiges?

The most elegant present I could get.

The older children weep among the flowers.

They believe this. Their laughter feeds the need

Like a juggler. Ten weeks pregnant. Who

Believes this? It is your love

Must feed the dancing snow, Mary

Shelley “created” Frankenstein. It doesn’t

matter, though. The shortage of available materials

Shatters my zest with festivity, one

Trembling afternoon—night—the dark trance

Up rainy cobblestones         bottle half empty

Full throttle         mired

In the petty frustrations of off-white sheets

Time flies by like a great whale

And I find my hand grows stale at the throttle

Of my many faceted and fake appearance

Who bucks and spouts by detour under the sheets

Hollow portals of solid appearance

Movies are poems, a holy bible, the great mother to us

People go by in the fragrant day

Accelerate softly my blood

But blood is still blood and tall as a mountain blood

Behind me green rubber grows, feet walk

In wet water, and dusty heads grow wide

Padré, Father, or fat old man, as you will,

I am afraid to succeed, afraid to fail

Tell me now, again, who I am

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 airy daylight, he was not a midget

And preferred to be known as a stunt-man.

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 airy 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, cozening whatever disguises

AFTER FRANK O’HARA

It’s 8:54 a.m. in Brooklyn it’s the 28th of July and

it’s probably 8:54 in Manhattan but I’m

in Brooklyn I’m eating English muffins and drinking

pepsi and I’m thinking of how Brooklyn is New

York city too how odd I usually think of it as

something all its own like Bellows Falls like Little

Chute like Uijongbu

I never thought on the Williamsburg

bridge I’d come so much to Brooklyn

just to see lawyers and cops who don’t even carry

guns taking my wife away and bringing her back

No

and I never thought Dick would be back at Gude’s

beard shaved off long hair cut and Carol reading

his books when we were playing cribbage and

watching the sun come up over the Navy Yard

across the river

I think I was thinking when I was

ahead I’d be somewhere like Perry street erudite

dazzling slim and badly loved

contemplating my new book of poems

to be printed in simple type on old brown paper

feminine marvelous and tough

It is night. You are asleep. And beautiful tears

Have blossomed in my eyes. Guillaume Apollinaire is dead.

The big green day today is singing to itself

A vast orange library of dreams, dreams

Dressed in newspaper, wan as pale thighs

Making vast apple strides towards “The Poems.”

“The Poems” is not a dream. It is night. You

Are asleep. Vast orange libraries of dreams

Stir inside “The Poems.” On the dirt-covered ground

Crystal tears drench the ground. Vast orange dreams

Are unclenched. It is night. Songs have blossomed

In the pale crystal library of tears. You

Are asleep. A lovely light is singing to itself,

In “The Poems,” in my eyes, in the line, “Guillaume

Apollinaire is dead.”

Sleep half sleep half silence and with reasons

For you I starred in the movie

Made on the site

Of Benedict Arnold’s triumph, Ticonderoga, and

I shall increase from this

As I am a cowboy and you imaginary

Ripeness begins corrupting every tree

Each strong morning         A man signs a shovel

And so he digs        It hurts         and so

We get our feet wet in air           we love our lineage

Ourselves         Music, salve, pills, kleenex, lunch

And the promise never to truckle          A man

Breaks his arm and so he sleeps         he digs

In sleep half silence and with reason

AFTER MICHAUX

A few rape men or kill coons so I bat them!

Daughter prefers to lay ’em on a log and tear their hair.

Moaning Jimmy bats her!

“Ill yeah!” da junky says. “I aint as fast no more,

I’ll rent a lot in a cemetree.”           He’ll recite it

two times scary sunday O sea-daisy o’er a shade!

Au revoir, scene!

She had a great toe!

She-tail’s raggy, too!

Jelly bend over put ’im on too!

She laid a crab!

Jelly him sure later! Jelly-ass ails are tough!

She lays all his jelly on him!

Eeeeeeooooowww!! La Vie!

Her lay races is out here, she comes on, I’m on her, I’ll

fart in one ear! “Jelly, sir?” “Shall I raise him yet?”

Long-toed we dance on where Shit-toe can see ten blue men

lickin’ ten new partners and the sucker’s son!

“Mating, Madame, can whip you up up!

My Jimmy’s so small he wiggles plum moans! Ladies shimmy