The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (60 page)

& John Paul.

& me writing it down here.

This page has ashes on it

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.”

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.

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
.

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.

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.

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.

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 you

can’t help realizing

you know you can’t feel

any worse than he felt,

so

hell,

why not be exuberant!

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!”

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.

Here they are the wheels, so I hear.

Bon voyage, little ones.

Follow me down

Through the locks. There is no key.

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.

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.