The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan Read online

  FOR ANSELM HOLLO

  1.

  “Who’s a ‘black’ artist?”

  On this plane

  w/all the room in the world,

  Dollars: 303 . . .

  Secret Clouds

  I can’t get into you,

  yet,

  tho Leaving Cheyenne

  was so beautiful:

  it made me cry, perfectly

  relaxed

  a small gift I now am remembering

  in Buffalo

  2.

  Breathe normally

  Do not smoke

  Awaiting rescue:

  Eat, drink, sleep, or

  Not . . . .

  Don’t.

  You were stopped, & searched,

  when least you expected.

  What was found was nothing.

  Don’t expect it to be the same

  coming back, baby.

  Strapped: deprived

  Shoot yourself: stay alive

  3.

  Ride it out

  John F. Kennedy to Heathrow (London)

  which involves you in

  My Life With Jackie Kennedy

  a human life

  MAYA

  Where civilization is taking place.

  I mean, genuine civilization: no proportionate loss

  of spleen.

  “The head speaks out from the heart to the head connected

  to the heart.”

  Apologies to Val & Tom

  October: half-moon rising: London sky, Piccadilly’s, greyish-black

  Neon makes it funky: 3 Chesterfield Kings: 5 quid a hundred dexies

  City magic makes it easy for a man to be a monkey! All the geese went “honk!”

  In Hyde Park where I walked today: I thought of you as I walked my way

  Not that way toward where you are; that I had turned away from, from thinking

  What I had meant to do yesterday. Last year’s London’s disappeared, broken up

  The way New York City had, before & after London last year. Nevertheless I’m

  here

  Walking around. I wish I’d run into you both upon these grounds, Hyde Park.

  I couldn’t come to visit you, your home, today (& this is dumb) because

  I had no place from which to come from. Does that make sense?

  (It does.) & I miss seeing you, my friends, & talk. But Val, I liked you calling me

  on the phone,

  It seemed so neighbourly. & Tom, I liked reading your poems, in my room,

  alone

  (proofs); & the words I wrote then were truly mine, & not “to atone” . . .

  I will come visit you, you two, in good time,

  days to come; I’ll talk a lot, show-off my loves, & sometimes rime.

  One, London

  In Hyde Park Gate 14 white budgie scratchings mean

  What? Black orchids on a wall serve for clouds, loom

  Up from an orange bed floating, a host of words; Fall; heat coming on

  White breathing disappearing as it defines this room

  Above a friend his mate’s asleep; he’s somewhere else; England

  Here clucks & poetry don’t mix. October 1st; half-moon rising

  Soon it seems to descend. Perhaps a clock is a good idea

  It tells one what to do, when

  Two weeks & a day past it seemed so easy to take, NY’s room

  & NY’s speed made it seem easy, giving; easy living

  Tho NY’s room was someone else’s, somewhere else too

  Here words take their own sweet time arriving

  Here to sleep a day & a night away seems mild. Still there’s plenty to do:

  Birds to be looked at, pills, a warm bath, letters to be written to you.

  Southampton Business

  Train Ride . . .

  16 coaches long!

  not hardly With a song in my heart . . .

  I remember my

  first love, &

  the last time I . . . .

  Here you can read

  “We Arrived &

  What We Did”

  A girl’s poem

  but not now.

  Now it’s here.

  It’s outside,

  but you can’t see

  anything.

  Now it’s night here.

  Take a walk

  down an Elm Street

  in the rain

  Up

  from the Train Station,

  Turn, turn, turn again.

  Now, you’re here.

  Go inside

  & open up

  Viva! Fat City

  & the long hours pass

  like buzzes

  gone

  down a highway.

  & nothing is really happening at all

  It all happens so fast,

  so,

  STOP

  Get back up & go.

  That was life, sometimes you ran dry

  Some mornings you’d wake up all wet. Today

  For example, was a black day; business as usual,

  However; i.e. everyone was getting the business

  Our nation’s leaders stared blankly straight

  At us with expressions of grave concern

  the sun

  Came up while the rain was coming down, like

  Nobody’s business, so, nobody didn’t see you

  In the altogether period me needling business

  Myself, & then,

  a burst of political jabber

  before you

  SLEEP

  Talk like you don’t hear any more

  not since the old days

  Love Poetry

  cigarette

  Huey Long, get shot

  & all the time

  the girl in the Keane painting

  awake

  upstairs

  sleeping

  while the morning Times was saying

  $75,000 was paid for a Roy Lichtenstein yesterday. A

  James Rosenquist went for 26. Highest price ever for one

  Of those. & a life-size kitchen stove complete with sagging

  Pots & Pans, $46,000. The Germans took the prizes, the Americans

  Got the business, the Times went on to note. By god,

  That’s not how it was in the old days! Oh well, I think I’d

  like to have a de Kooning, for nothing, myself. Or else, to be

  Perfectly frank, just go on minding my own business.

  Keeping it up going on

  & on

  & on & on . . .

  No more Monkey-business

  I think

  No, I’d just as soon be where you are, asleep,

  Awake, kissing your neck before we’d fuck a lot

  From behind holding your breasts which are warm

  Nobody’s business but our own

  Sleep, or don’t: do whatever you feel like

  Stay as long as you like.

  THREE POEMS: GOING TO CANADA

  Itinerary

  Thursday & Friday:

  (Southampton, New York City)

  Wake up & crash land

  pat the old lady

  have a drink

  tie shoes

  take bus

  change trains

  go, to the doctor

  score

  HIGH

  eat, beans &

  bread pudding, get

  slightly smashed on cheap red

  take a walk

  to clear your head

  smoke hash / shoot smack

  nod out / wake up with a start / take off

  Go to Canada.

  How to Get to Canada

  borrow 50 from George

  Spend 2 for Tarantula

  and 4 for a little Horse

  and 5 for two meals

  and 1 or 2 for King-size Chesterfields

  and 2.50 to ride the bus

  and 2 more for taxicabs

  & 1 for tips & 2
5 cents for 1 more

  bus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . buy a ticket

  for 31. Check your bag, free.

  Steal Night Song, & Prison Letters

  From A Soledad Brother. Wait . . . . . . Fly:

  15 cents is plenty to keep you in the sky.

  Love

  Missing you

  in Air Canada

  Written on Red Roses & Yellow Light

  Acid

  aquamarine

  squares

  moving

  up ashtray

  Smoking

  a soft white chick

  head red

  chic, tacky

  fur ruffling over

  leather

  Or is that what that is?

  “18”

  she says,

  to

  the pretty, plain girl below

  severe auburn

  hair

  her red shirt, cowboy

  left pocket half-full of bosom

  & on down

  sleek curve of denim

  thigh-meat

  weird shoelets

  tiny flesh-holes

  Acid

  green floor

  waving, or

  wavering

  More & more

  floor

  shoes, black, “straight”, square

  out front

  of monumental black

  dress

  above

  fatty calves, no

  ankles

  A city lady, O, obese!

  Not me!

  I’m just sitting

  next the other green, plush

  a sofa

  rich

  with recent presences

  now presumably inside:

  Light up!

  a

  slow cigarette

  with my

  Most Valuable Player

  lighter:

  Now

  A Head

  sucking

  smokey air “in” breathing out

  Waiting

  in the Waiting Room

  to speak of Necessities:

  & Now

  my turn.

  “Hello, again!

  Remember me, Doctor?”

  “Of course! You’re

  the Poet. Come in,

  What is it, this time?”

  From “Anti-Memoirs”

  FOR TONY TOWLE

  Mid-Friday morn, 10 o’clock, I go to India

  At the suggestion of a man I barely know: André

  Malraux. Benares. The first house I enter I see

  A photograph of the murderer of Ghandi on the wall.

  “There are too many Reactionaries still, in India,” I remember

  Nehru telling André Malraux. I step closer to the picture,

  Read the words printed at the bottom: photograph by

  Rudolph Burckhardt. This is unreal! I leave India, return

  On foot to Hyattsville, Maryland. 1705 Abraham Lincoln Road.

  My hosts are absent still. Their children have swallowed Rat

  Poison, & they are at the Hospital, caught in the puke

  & ye shall be healed, that scene, fright, terror, nothing serious

  In the end except it might have been. . . . The Rolling Stones fill this place

  A sweet speed-freak is lost in Harlem. Mr. Chester Himes. Life

  Going on quite merrily Hunting For The Whale. A wealth

  Of fresh Whale-tracks considerably cheers us up.

  Galaxies

  Winter. You think of sex, but it’s asleep

  Briefly you contemplate points of revolution

  A naked artist smokes. Dreaming, you wake up & you say

  “Everybody is a hero, everybody makes you cry.” Ah,

  This morning I was footprints in the snow

  Listening to the words from the burning bush all the day

  We sleep & dream our lives away. You dream

  I don’t live here, & when you wake up, what a relief,

  I do. Someone to light the fire, babble for you

  I dream a 7 ft. tall Watusi in full tribal regalia

  & carrying a long spear promises to send me crumbly LSD

  In a New York Times. He does, & I am pleased, but amazed

  It’s 9:45 of a Saturday morning, December the 26th. Through eight

  Window-panes gray white light is pouring in. No, it’s leaning in

  Sitting in, by the fire, a chair. “God, more money, please!” No

  Coal in the bin. But there is the fire, still in sight. And there is

  More wood, to light. The fire leaps up the flue. The artist’s smoke

  Is fixed in space. Above my head is wood. I can’t see a warm bed, &

  Inside it, you. But I’m beginning to see The light, not

  a bit older, & less cold than last night.

  In Anne’s Place

  It’s just another April almost morning, St. Mark’s Place

  Harris & Alice are sleeping in beds; it’s far too early

  For a Scientific Massage, on St. Mark’s Place, though it’s

  The right place if you feel so inclined. Later

  Jim Carroll’s double bums a camel from a ghost Aram Saroyan

  Now, there goes Chuck, friend from out of a no longer existent past

  Into the just barely existent future, wide-awake, purposeful

  As Aram Saroyan’s dad: a little bit more lovely writing, & then

  Maybe a small bet on New York’s chances this morning. It’s not

  Exactly love, nor is it faith, certainly it isn’t hope; no

  It’s simply that one has a feeling, yes

  You always do have a feeling & over the years it’s become habit

  Being moved by that; to be moved having a feeling,

  So it’s perfectly natural to get up & go to the telephone

  To lay a little something down on your heart’s choice

  Calling right from where you are, in Anne’s place,

  As to your heart’s delight, here comes sunlight.

  Autobiography

  FOR HENRY KANABUS

  A colorful river of poetry drives forward

  into what has never been named

  where all women are fiery

  all roses are scary

  and all kisses are eternal

  at its worst it leans into

  soft oceans of romantic mush.

  A little loving can solve a lot of things.

  If a man is in solitude

  the world is translated

  and wings sprout from the shoulders of

  The Slave.

  In my solitude

  I have seen things so clearly

  that were not true.

  For example

  once I kissed a woman and nothing happened.

  He is not really thinking.

  His poems have too many

  flaming ears

  queens of daybreak

  fallen stars and solar arrows

  Power to the people and all like that.

  He loves these things.

  2.

  When truth throws up

  its translucent roosters

  onto fountains of eggnog

  He wants you to see

  right through these things

  Just behind them are

  massive granite anguish shapes

  humped over, feet on,

  snout to, the earth.

  If you want to see

  the light show

  touch that lump, you rooster!

  3.

  Who can like that?

  I must admit I dislike

  seeing human life

  compared to something smaller than itself

  making love

  compared to a comma

  death to periods.

  4.

  García Lorca pinched me again!

  5.

  I like about twenty lines

  of this poem, the dus
t

  of that mud which speaks

  to sharpen silences. I like

  the fiery butterfly puzzles of

  this pilgrimage toward clarities

  of great mud intelligence and feeling. Not

  more deep, more shallow!

  6.

  Only the poem exists, like an

  Ambassador, the American ambassador to

  say, Africa. Like a vegetable, which says,

  “Africa is hollow.” Like an empty tourist.

  And then the tourist hears

  The drums of the vegetables.

  Africa flies up into his own frail arms.

  “I feel an absence inside, when

  I hear a lovely poem . . . True, as

  it is good, knowing

  that glasses are to drink from.”

  7.

  It is good, absence.

  Postmarked Grand Rapids

  Robert Creeley reading

  Mark Twain and Mr. Clemens

  STOPS

  while Philip Whalen

  writing

  “The Epic Airplane Notebook Poem”

  Pauses . . .

  to discuss their drinking problem

  with the Hostesses in the Sky

  I’m watching

  writing

  drinking

  waiting for my change.

  Further Definitions (Waft)

  (AFTER MICHAEL BROWNSTEIN)

  a band of musicians: up tight

  care not: like

  understanding: dismissal

  waiving: automatic pilot

  compared to: no baloney

  began to say: shut up

  engraft feathers in a damaged wing: take a hike

  experience to the full: kill

  cultivators of land they do not own: friends

  absolute: ready

  pity: pull leg of

  language here fails as mathematics has before it: at

  is skilled in: oblivious

  ended: borne

  delicate constitutions: fascists

  promoted: serf

  one who dispenses with clothes: liar

  lip to lip being the first, lip: right on

  to heart, through the ear, is the second: “poof!”

  graduate: push around

  too clever riders are not good at horseplay: “Ma Femme”

  food on a journey: chow

  center of the earth: hara