A Bernadette Mayer Reader Read online

  Eve of Easter

  Milton, who made his illiterate daughters

  Read to him in five languages

  Till they heard the news he would marry again

  And said they would rather hear he was dead

  Milton who turns even Paradise Lost

  Into an autobiography, I have three

  Babies tonight, all three are sleeping:

  Rachel the great great great granddaughter

  Of Herman Melville is asleep on the bed

  Sophia and Marie are sleeping

  Sophia namesake of the wives

  Of Lewis Freedson the scholar and Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Marie my mother’s oldest name, these three girls

  Resting in the dark, I made the lucent dark

  I stole images from Milton to cure opacous gloom

  To render the room an orb beneath this raucous

  Moon of March, eclipsed only in daylight

  Heavy breathing baby bodies

  Daughters and descendants in the presence of

  The great ones, Milton and Melville and Hawthorne,

  everyone is speaking

  At once, I only looked at them all blended

  Each half Semitic, of a race always at war

  The rest of their inherited grace

  From among Nordics, Germans and English,

  writers at peace

  Rushing warring Jews into democracy when actually

  Peace is at the window begging entrance

  With the hordes in the midst of air

  Too cold for this time of year,

  Eve of Easter and the shocking resurrection idea

  Some one baby stirs now, hungry for an egg

  It’s the Melville baby, going to make a fuss

  The Melville one’s sucking her fingers for solace

  She makes a squealing noise

  Hawthorne baby’s still deeply asleep

  The one like my mother’s out like a light

  The Melville one though the smallest wants the most

  Because she doesn’t really live here

  Hawthorne will want to be nursed when she gets up

  Melville sucked a bit and dozed back off

  Now Hawthorne is moving around, she’s the most hungry

  Yet perhaps the most seduced by darkness in the room

  I can hear Hawthorne, I know she’s awake now

  But will she stir, disturbing the placid sleep

  Of Melville and insisting on waking us all

  Meanwhile the rest of the people of Lenox

  Drive up and down the street

  Now Hawthorne wants to eat

  They all see the light by which I write, Hawthorne sighs

  The house is quiet, I hear Melville’s toy

  I’ve never changed the diaper of a boy

  I think I’ll go get Hawthorne and nurse her for the pleasure

  Of cutting through darkness before her measured noise

  Stimulates the boys, I’ll cook a fish

  Retain poise in the presence

  Of heady descendants, stone-willed their fathers

  Look at me and drink ink

  I return a look to all the daughters and I wink

  Eve of Easter, I’ve inherited this

  Peaceful sleep of the children of men

  Rachel, Sophia, Marie and again me

  Bernadette, all heart I live, all head, all eye, all ear

  I lost the prejudice of paradise

  And wound up caring for the babies of these guys

  Lookin Like Areas of Kansas

  “We had our first cucumber yesterday”

  —Nathaniel Hawthorne

  New England is awful

  The winter’s five months long

  The sun may come out today but that doesnt mean anything

  There are Yankees

  Men & women who cant talk

  They wear dark colors & trudge around, all in browns & greys,

  looking up at the sky & pretending to predict all the

  big storms

  Or else they nod wisely

  Yup, a northeaster

  The sky turns yellow all the time

  The river’s grey

  Everything’s black or white

  Everybody eats beans

  Everthing freezes

  Everybody lives in an old paper house

  People chop wood all the time

  They slide around on these slippery icy roads

  All the trees look dead

  They make long shadows on the snow

  There’s only daylight for about four hours

  People sit home & drink boilermakers

  At night all the telephones go out & the power lines blow down

  Every weekend there’s a storm so nobody can come to see you

  The fireplaces are very drafty

  The mountains look black

  There are no books at the store

  Religion’s a big thing

  Everybody has a history

  Sex is drudgery for people in New England

  It’s 12° & they use Trojans or Tahitis

  Some people have to have a generator

  The windows are very small

  You have to go out & get cold

  All of a sudden the blue sky blows away

  Everything’s buried under five feet of snow

  It doesn’t go away until April or May

  Everything’s either apples or some kind of squash

  The houses are all drafty boxes & you cant open the windows

  People tell stories about each other

  People have to come & plow the snow off to the side of your road

  Then people shovel pathways to different cars

  They have town meetings about the new sewer systems

  The ideas of people in general are not raised higher than the roofs of their houses

  Even the water freezes in the tap

  Essay

  I guess it’s too late to live on the farm

  I guess it’s too late to move to a farm

  I guess it’s too late to start farming

  I guess it’s too late to begin farming

  I guess we’ll never have a farm

  I guess we’re too old to do farming

  I guess we couldn’t afford to buy a farm anyway

  I guess we’re not suited to being farmers

  I guess we’ll never have a farm now

  I guess farming is not in the cards now

  I guess Lewis wouldn’t make a good farmer

  I guess I can’t expect we’ll ever have a farm now

  I guess I have to give up all my dreams of being a farmer

  I guess I’ll never be a farmer now

  We couldn’t get a farm anyway though Allen Ginsberg got one late in life

  Maybe someday I’ll have a big garden

  I guess farming is really out

  Feeding the pigs and the chickens, walking between miles of rows of crops

  I guess farming is just too difficult

  We’ll never have a farm

  Too much work and still to be poets

  Who are the farmer poets

  Was there ever a poet who had a self-sufficient farm

  Flannery O’Connor raised peacocks

  And Wendell Berry has a farm

  Faulkner may have farmed a little

  And Robert Frost had farmland