The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (74 page)

“What?”

“Will you keep it on while I get in bed?”

“Sure.”

“Their lives are as fragile as
The Glass Menagerie
.”

Saturday Night on TV

“Oh, she dances, Ted. . . . and it’s so great!!

“She’s not supposed to be able to dance!

“You’re making a big mistake,

writing a poem,

and not watching this.”

“Shut up. I’m getting the last lines.”

“You are not.”

duty is the primal curse

from which we must redeem ourselves

G. B. SHAW 1891

If by my hasty words I gave offence,

Know I would stop my tongue in recompense

Were that an answer or an end to rage:

But I am no philosopher, nor sage;

If love and friendship hasty words can kill,

I would not speak; but I must speak my will.

These days I burn: and I cannot be still:

Burn I must; and with fire must I kill

Those unmixed humours in me which bring rage

Upon those whose griefs I would most assuage.

Now then, I must myself ask recompense

For cause which causes me to give offence.

So Duty me no Duties: Be not strange:

Give me your hand, your love, and I will change.

Now she guards her chalice

In a temple of fear. Once

She softly held me near, til

Rain, falling lightly, flooded pain.

Alone, the pale darkness

Became too much to bear. Then

She quickly drew away, drawing

Darkness down on Summer’s day.

Alone, this sudden darkness

Became too much to bear.

Then,

Afraid to draw away,

I closed my eyes

To close of Summer’s day.

My beard is a leaping staff

I love to hear it creak

it gathers moss in the morning mist

in the middle of my weakness and

when I stand and clank

it gives me shoes

My eyes scurry towards the sea

legs scuttling beneath them

shell glistening like split peas

in the sun. I have two, a right one,

and a left. In spring my eyes go deaf

and are rancid and rank with

blue

And my belly! ah, it is a shining thing

it sings at sunup on the back fence of

my buttocks, burping and belching in the sheer joy

of strumps. It clumps. I offer my belly the sumps

of my simple sorrow, which once knew

whom to name, and so it grew.

I am a bog, a ditch, a burrow beneath a

sole survivor of study. Unbowed

I am bloody with bad confetti, and I go

in a flagon of gore. Oh sweet stalactites

upon this shore,

“I ain’t coming back

No more!”

Did you see me that night

I climbed the wallpaper tree, white

with rage, whiskey in my pocket? Fright

could never fathom my undressings, nor blight

my loneliness, which sits here at my desk, in sight

of homeless waifs, who bite

my thighs my heart for sustenance. My plight

Is insignificant but you, surely you saw my light

burning for you alone, the night I sliced the slightly

lengthy tail from the scraggly poet’s kite?

For you I starred in the movie made on the site

of Benedict Arnold’s triumph, Ticonderoga, and I indict

you to take my hand, which reaches out for yours, in spite

of the change of season, this Spring which holds me tight.

TO CAROL CLIFFORD

became in Alamogordo. Then the blast-

off into total boredom. Referred to as

a “weird-o.” The sleeping sleazus of

honey love. Circumference equals piR
²
.

Evergreen concatenations of airmail stamps

bringing me fearsome and rust. Wood in the dust

bowl. Howl in the woodhole. Cold manifestation

of last of the cruel and the “name” to the first.

Sundown. Manifesto. Color and cognizance.

Then to cleave to a cast-off emotion,

(clarity! clarity!) a semblance of motion, omniscience.

Ah, Bernie, to think of you alone, suffering

from German measles, only a part-time mother and

father

bringing you ginger ale; and

the great speckle bird now extinct;

what frolicsome times we’d have had, eating

ants and clover in the yard, Ayax

pissing on the grass! Is it possible

great black rat packs

were running amuck amidst the murk away back east,

and you, and me, and Ayax,

giggling happy here? But it never was,

never. You were a Campfire Girl

and I was afraid.

Giants in the sky; roses in streams that castle; rocks

in roll; the flower-bird drops singing smitten low; and always

waste of faces bullet it; and more than these: ground

moons! High! and seas to rot upon the tides! the

loveliness that longs for butterfly! There is no pad

against the lack of pinned: there are in the world of vast

reflected limp. And beauty piles stone. But every garden shows

have learned the secret. Dreams beauties beauty in the world,

blossoms, snatched, are thrown, and die men’s foes. And

lack of soul is no to fill the youth.

Of dumbed bondage the heavy accent of.

The flames of love are horsed to pull the knee

Of downward pressing lips. The Earth of waste’s

Deep hill. It is. It need not go.

Such powers weld by chain that must not know.

When cart is in of progress, down saddest the world,

Then lack to beauty tragedy are used.

And there is no.

(FOR ANNE KEPLER)

Futile rhapsodies resound from hotly

blind to dank venetian blinds upon

whose verdant crevices blue scary

shadows bound and bound and grow

and then grow still. Yes it is not

yet daylight, no light creeps with

hesitance across the blind, my desk

is shadow, silence lies in the room:

Sleep half sleep half silence and

with reason portends new seasons,

nor shadow, nor substance; blind

fascination reduced to contemplation.

Then, praise for this golden surge

of energy! It is time to rise in

silence, raise the blind, and turn

again to poetry, away from sleep.

You come into my life a little yellow

Around the gills and I offer you 41

Pills of indeterminate mixture but you

Will not swallow them you are like

The Sunflower: you are waiting for a

Madman! Now you are like a madam, I

lean over and gaze intently into your

Eyeballs for 32 hours whereupon you swoon

And say, “Perceval, you’re wonderful!”

“Everybody sucks nobody fucks” says John