A Bernadette Mayer Reader Read online

  Grace seemed flabbergasted but she couldnt have been more amazed than I was. All her exhortations not to speak which were so hard to keep to before, seemed to have their effect on me now. I couldnt say a single word. If I’d thought Grace were even sitting on her chair, I might’ve thought at that point she would just fall off of it, but since neither of us seemed to be subject to any of the effects of gravity or any normal thing at all that we knew, we both seemed to float staring at each other for an unaccountable while and then we burst out laughing. Just before that I had had the thought “but the elevator’s broken” and then we laughed so hard and so long we thought we would die laughing and lose our minds and by the time we could conceive of stopping laughing we were moaning from so much laughing, we began throwings things about the house in such a way, if anybody’d seen us, they’d have thought we were lunatics. Finally I grabbed Grace’s arm & shouted as loud as I could, “What did you find out!”

  Concluding Unscientific

  Postscript

  The pluralistic yellows of fall’s sun

  Scare the wits out of me and my daughters

  In between the artful leaf shadows

  You dont wanna mention slow reactions

  To the merest daily sounds

  You can feel a new device in your mouth

  With wonder liquid bread with healthy head

  If clean the art that’s wrought by pen or type

  Day after day why not relent to love scared

  In silly cleanliness new artifact hence

  By all that’s kind I beg a natural helper

  As a valuable book falls sophistically to floor

  Of the joint we share without equal metaphor

  Till August heedlessly makes something end

  I wish my friend you’d love me against

  The wishes of everyone sensible

  I am certainly not so beautiful as to presume

  Like the meanings heard on streets & avenues

  & trials on country roads I learned about you from

  That I would be more well from your acquaintance

  Like the fooling afterthought of a notorious well-wisher

  The glass might know what its warmer heart did not

  & if I meet with men who dont believe in even speaking

  Phosphoric, I’ll expect a relentless well-nourished neglect

  Like the natural equation of lovely lakes to swamps

  & red the rug it falls criss cross without

  Seeing heraldic my dumb ass so-called suffering

  Cause I look ok but I cant continue on

  So let me fall by form of spurious need of end

  Near your cock & cunt, transforming friend.

  Watching the Cornplex

  Train-Track Changes

  To Men

  You put on an ornate ballgown

  You say “someone has to do it”

  You take me to where you work,

  The inside of a pyramid with chasms,

  Watching the complex train-track changes

  Products and objects make love to my father

  Two babies are born—Bruno and Daisy

  You take your shirt off looking boylike & lovely

  You get on the plane, both clown & wizard

  And then get off in a comedy of manners

  Our dates become a comedy of dinners

  Your name rhymes with clothes

  Your plane folds & flies away

  Without us, I’ll make the next one

  We are enclosed in spaceless epics by breathless bricks

  & still we’ll meet like runes or the leashes for hawks

  Let’s go! Can we stay? Go to sleep.

  A tree wouldn’t talk or weep if I-forget-what

  And you in the train’s opulent rooms

  Switch your cock to a baby and then say

  “Must there (not) be a law against this?”

  You add, “I have been thinking of you in my head”

  You wear green glitter on your shirt instead of

  A tie, that’s how I recognize you as you

  You are the prep cook the sous-chef you make

  Duplicating potato salad like the loaves & fishes

  You create gorgeous paper-like sculptures of foods

  We go down in the car through threatening snows

  To arrive in a second to eat in a renovated place

  You and I tell “what” we are at the end of a movie

  Our podium of soft loud feet flies by accident

  I take the train to your house to hear Shakespeare & Verdi

  Everyone applauds when you walk in. The director

  Holds up each actor & describes his physical being

  I talk to your father but only by telephone

  You have the royal blue 8½ x 11 notebook with the lock on it

  I want one but you say you cant get them anymore

  I walk twice through that city I’ve been in before

  All through its rooms, its streets and its Commons

  A Woman I Mix Men Up . . .

  A woman I mix men up

  In my dreams & other ways, I wonder

  If this is the same as knowing

  What is & is not socialism, a man I’m sure

  Does the same thing, mixing up

  The mother for the lover or

  Vice versa not to mention the mighty

  Homosexual mix-ups which happen

  Just as much, oh god whoever

  He or she might be, I ask you

  Why is David Lewis or Lewis Ed?

  Why Anne Catherine or Catherine Ted?

  Because I am not or dont want to be sure

  I raise these questions to the heavens

  Wherein I might, as proposed by a child

  Sit on a cloud risking falling through

  Should the child know a cloud is not solid

  & should she bring no parachute, I feel

  The risk’s as great in loving as it is

  In voting & your my lover’s meeting even in

  Dreams this other woman or man of your own sex

  Seems like the newspapers, all too predictable

  What types in what outfits’ll appear

  Doing what in what postures, suits & poses, to remake

  The world is something not enough people dream of, one

  Shouldnt use the word dream & one shouldnt use

  The words should and shouldnt, cast off the book & find

  No expectations, understanding liberalism’s not

  The same as conservatism or (god forbid) mysticism, there is

  Morning and there is midday and there is night, there are

  Phases of this one moon factually attached to the earth

  Scatter the dictionaries, they dont

  Tell the truth yet, I mix up words with truth

  And abstraction with presence, who cares

  Without a form who I am, I know I will timely die

  But you two, God and this his image the junky bomb

  Live forever to destroy the eternal the immortal

  In what they used to call Man, now not.

  Eight Blocks

  for Bill Kushner

  A very nice little purple dress

  A box of colored film cans

  A man with flowers for his Other, then another,

  European women walking arm in arm

  How lonely I am in this long line

  Cops saying it’s not sensible to be

  Pretty women of ethics, she sighs, I gesture,

  She says, if you walk fast you get tired and if

  You walk slow you still do, she forgot I forgot

  The elevated fingers of the sun we sang

  In just voices to virgin Mrs. Kerchief-Cane

  (To backtrack on a walk’s ok) who was that man

  Who knew what was behind me, now it’s gonna rain,

  Wind on the fat man’s flat sequins

  There are two different sides of the street

  B
etween them is the traffic of the avenue

  There are four corners on which to meet,

  French cigarettes in the Arabian window

  Then safe in the sweaty public school

  But mothers and fathers are too early

  To rescue each baby from a day of rigidity

  Parents mass as at disasters and hide on steps

  They peek in the window of the locked room’s door

  There’s that woman I saw this morning

  Carrying her cigarettes like a wedding bouquet

  The Garden

  for Adam Purple

  Close to a house on a piece of ground

  For the growing of vegetables, flowers & fruits

  On fertile well-developed land

  Is a delightful place or state, a paradise

  Often a place for public enjoyment

  Where grows the alyssum to cure our rage

  Oriental night of the careless developers

  Carpet of snow of the drugged landlords

  Basket of gold the city’s confused

  Royal carpet of its bureaucracies,

  Bored with bombs

  Political ones of the complicated governments

  Now stick up the very orb

  For its nonmetal yet golden remains

  Competing with the larval corn borers

  The salaried test-borers

  Imminently lead anti-sexually down to the foundation

  Of the annihilation

  Of a circular garden in which live members of

  The mustard family

  The tomato or nightshade family

  The poppy family

  The geranium family

  The aster family

  The mint family

  The thistle or aster family

  The violet family (heartsease)

  The lily family

  The cucumber or gourd family

  The rose family

  The composite or daisy family

  The parsley or carrot family

  And other families

  (I dont think the pokeweed family lives there,

  It earns too little or too much money per year)

  We are told to swallow not a rainbow

  But like the celandine the juicy proposal

  That the lemon balm of low income housing,

  Applied like ageratum to the old Lower East Side

  (As early matured as the apricot)

  And probably turned by deeply divided leaves

  Like a rape of grapes before it’s all over

  Into the poison tomato leaf of middle income housing,

  Cannot coexist with the gleaming black raspberries

  In an ancient abandoned place

  Around Eldridge, Foresight and Stanton Streets

  We’re asked not to think, like pansies do

  That the pinnately compound, ovate, lanceolate, non-linear,

  lobed, compound, toothed, alternate, opposite,

  palmate, heart-shaped, stalkless, clasping,

  perfoliate, and basal rosette-ish leaves

  Can heal like the comfrey

  And cause to grow together

  The rough hairy leaves of the city’s people and

  the rough hairy leaves of the sublimity of

  a gardener’s art

  Made with vegetarian shit & free as cupid’s darts

  If all our eyes had the clarity of apples

  In a world as altered

  As if by the wood betony

  And all kinds of basil were the only rulers of the land

  It would be good to be together

  Both under and above the ground

  To be sane as the madwort,

  Ripe as corn, safe as sage,

  Various as dusty miller and hens & chickens,

  In politics as kindly fierce and dragonlike as tarragon,

  Revolutionary as the lily.

  Sonnet

  Love is a babe as you know and when you

  Put your startling hand on my cunt or arm or head

  Or better both your hands to hold in them my own

  I’m awed and we laugh with questions, artless

  Of me to speak so ungenerally of thee & thy name

  I have no situation and love is the same, you live at home

  Come be here my baby and I’ll take you elsewhere where

  You ain’t already been, my richer friend, and there

  At the bottom of my sale or theft of myself will you

  Bring specific flowers I will not know the names of

  As you already have and already will and already do

  As you already are with your succinctest cock

  All torn and sore like a female masochist that the rhyme

  Of the jewel you pay attention to becomes your baby born

  Sonnet

  It would be nice to lose one’s mind my mind

  I’d like to lose it I wouldn’t mind at all

  To be in the lunatic asylum at last

  All for you and for the taxi drivers

  I’ll go and be asked what year what day it is

  & who’s the president, how come he’s a resident

  I could teach prosody there but nobody

  Knows what it is

  So send me away to anybody

  Anywhere who might

  Not know something I might not

  Since I must vice versa live

  Whaddya mean perforce?

  Army or navy or marines?

  Warren Phinney

  A little boy on August first night

  Got into the colors possible in the light

  Of this universe & of his cock

  We spoke the words the little boy

  My little boy like in the liturgy & in the litany,

  Thee, more august that is magnificent

  Than any of the daily concerns, his soft skin.

  And losing my judgment I forgot about his Volkswagen

  Which was needed in the morning to carry his father

  And his mother to work, it was not his car

  But the drive wasnt far and before you left

  After the phone calls we answered

  From friends to find you there was time

  For another mention of the Russian Revolution

  Then I wound up with my feet at the head of the bed

  Knowing hippily about our stars, your guitar

  & the meeting from which we fled, the proper porcupines

  Having eaten enough of your parents’ car’s gaslines

  To give us time to make the little more love

  We’d dreamed of before the tow truck came.

  Holding the Thought of Love

  for Bill DeNoyelles

  And to render harmless a bomb or the like

  Of such a pouring in different directions of love

  Love scattered not concentrated love talked about,

  So let’s not talk of love the diffuseness of which

  Round our heads (that oriole’s song) like on the platforms

  Of the subways and at their stations is today defused

  As if by the scattering of light rays in a photograph

  Of the softened reflection of a truck in a bakery window

  You know I both understand what we found out and I don’t

  Hiking alone is too complex like a slap in the face

  Of any joyous appointment even for the making of money

  Abandoned to too large a crack in the unideal sphere

  of lack of summer

  When it’s winter, of wisdom in the astronomical arts,

  we as A & B

  Separated then conjoin to see the sights of Avenue C

  Sonnet

  I am supposed to think of my personal dot

  I do and it is dull if you won’t call

  Who cares Angel I could find you even within my wrist

  Nobody minds because of sleeping, I detest it myself

  Why doesnt anybody want to demand to make lov
e

  Female to actual famous female or vice versa

  Warm indoors is the repeating of the trivial of something

  It doesnt matter what, I’m tired of not

  Absence like parents is the astrophysical

  What who knows come in I’ve got my birth control out

  Come by get lost the curtain if fictionally red is not then real

  Nor’s the blood shed why for what, we warn televisions of it

  Dont say anything bad like fuck or shit or otherwise & besides

  You might have to wear ostensible clothing & hairdos all your lives

  A Chinese Breakfast

  Is it so far to the door?

  Does Max’s sandwich diminish my confidence to reach it?

  Do fears as unnatural as dreams to waking

  Reflect something of anything for everyone else?

  Should madness ensue, would the tiny hole

  For a dislodged nail in the wall be its focus?

  Does the belong world in you?

  Did the finch devour the bluejay

  Right in the cleft of the dead bird of paradise?

  Did a she slip the awful cup?

  As spring comes a man’s apple juice emits an ankle bracelet

  And you’re as forlorn as the mean dentist’s smock of our culture

  Plus a he can’t find a parking space cause the ice is still thick

  As the thief of the way a day might memory look

  Sonnet

  You jerk you didn’t call me up

  I haven’t seen you in so long

  You probably have a fucking tan

  & besides that instead of making love tonight

  You’re drinking your parents to the airport

  I’m through with you bourgeois boys

  All you ever do is go back to ancestral comforts

  Only money can get—even Catullus was rich but

  Nowadays you guys settle for a couch

  By a soporific color cable t.v. set

  Instead of any arc of love, no wonder

  The G.I. Joe team blows it every other time

  Wake up! It’s the middle of the night

  You can either make love or die at the hands of

  the Cobra Commander

  ____________

  To make love, turn to page 121.