A Bernadette Mayer Reader Page 8
To die, turn to page 172.
Sonnet
Other than what’s gone on and stupid art
I’ve no even memory of people and their part
In bed I forget all details
The female with the male entails
For whatever that’s worth who cares
He who worries or she who dares
To die practically without mentioning
Again our idiotic utopian friendships
All the city’s a mass of slush and ices
You might know I dont about poetries
My hand’s your hand within this rhyme
You look at me this is all fucked up time
I’m just a sparrow done up to be
An Amazon or something and he? or thee?
We Eat Out Together
My heart is a fancy place
Where giant reddish-purple cauliflowers
& white ones in French & English are outside
Waiting to welcome you to a boat
Over the low black river for a big dinner
There’s alot of choice among the foods
Even a tortured lamb served in pieces
En croute on a plate so hot as a rack
Of clouds blown over the cold filthy river
We are entitled to see anytime while we
Use the tablecovers to love each other
Publicly dishing out imitative luxuries
To show off poetry’s extreme generosity
Then home in the heart of a big limousine
Homeopathic Busyness
Rigorously going from field to field
To plow up the internecine wars, how do
People find the time for their suppers
Or lost articles, there’s so much blood
On the precinct steps even in the imagist snow
And I go from the moments are becoming tinier
To soon it will be bloody tomorrow’s being over
Instead of any extent of thought’s, love’s
Or work’s privileges big enough to be
The right doses. I make little money at it
But then who doesn’t wake up at 6 am to think
Before the grapefruits’ eyes, the student cereals
Floating around in, of all things, some milk
Before the window’s corridor where the snow flies up
Incidents Report Sonnet
for Grace
Woke up from dream on
July 9 1965, dream was erotic
(can’t remember what was in it),
I think the woman was attempting
to sit on her chair while
lifting the man’s wallet
but then on the boatride my hand
got caught in the elevator door
by the firecracker tossed in
by a child who was a woman as missing
as the coffee money, anyway I
lost balance and, falling, woke up
jerking off through the chair,
another chair, was still falling
on my foot, sorry.
Incidents Report Sonnet #2
for Grace too
I was not yet married when
at age 2, a female other, I
put my finger into the forms of address
of the most blue night early in the morning
and said to my sister Rosemary, “Well,
what do you think of this!”
At the time we were both
sitting on the floor before the balls
of blue glass we were to clean
so often in the future and by the window
Rosemary once fell out of, who agreed
our exploration was fascinating
Only trouble is
Our mother hit the ceiling
Incidents Report Sonnet #5
for Grace also
Now you must remember that bed
we slept in head to feet in upstate new york.
David who was probably four
had just so badly injured his foot.
We had scared the wits out of the kids
playing hide & seek outdoors in the dark.
We ate Canadian Oat Bread and baked
millions of potatoes for our charges.
You and I took notes on everything
including Colin’s dream ravings.
I’m forgetting to mention many things
including attempting to swim in the shallow stream.
Then we got into our tiny bed together
with our shared immortal fear of love.
Sonnet
ash
Ash is left behind from things
laugh
As I love to see you laughing when you come
drink
Or even drink—boom, wow! a wild boy
plate
Bring those damn apricots on a gold plate
crack
Before bottles in the park go crack
walls
Toward wilder heroinistic walls and we
train
Must then get on the red & tan, not the train
traffic
Or that exacting traffic plane
pages
Between the pages of this your book
O.K.
Read by many O.K. people
know
Who know that stupid
noise
Noise is coming from the street
still
Still in the still night
independence
On independence day welcome death!
with Philip Good
Sonnet We Are Ordinary C’mere
Excerpts I love you from abstracts
So what who cares songs of one and
Experience of this is a case like
Whole and I am not from there I write
To you to say I know nothing as ever
No rhyming no everything there is
No proceeding no thinking you will be my
What will you be? And that is the end
Except for the instance
What are you wearing?
Why aren’t you here?
Where’d you put the window?
C’mere
Tell me the rest of it
Sonnet
To perform for you, ask me why, shall I sleep?
You make love so beautifully I don’t know what to do
You come and put your university hand
You’ve thrown yourself off the roof by now
A white dog chases a man around the park
Your school hand your rich hand your suburban hand
Cares if I come I am a woman & we women must both
Have babies & there’s my mirror & there’s my baby
I want one intent on your form like a room
Prepare food and eat it if the race would survive
The crystal lay like a comparison with wealth to you
I checked and you don’t have your car keys
Can I believe her? So
Returned from the dead.
Sonnet
Beauty of songs your absence I should not show
How artfully I love you, can you love me?
Let’s be precise let’s abdicate decorum
You come around you often stay you hit home
Now you are knocking, you need a tylenol;
From all that comedy what will you tell?
At least you speak, I think I’d better not;
Often men and not women have to sleep
You’ve come and gone—to write the perfect poem
And not ten like men or blossoms, but I am profligate
I strike the ground for ruin while you sensibly sleep
And so in this at least a poem can have an end
How could you sleep, I go to wake you up
My Lysistrata, my unannounced rhyme
Incandescent War Poem Sonnet
Even before I saw the chambered nautilus
I wanted to sail not in the us navy
Tonight I’m waiting for you, your letter
At the same time his letter, the view of you
By him and then by me in the park, no rhymes
I saw you, this is in prose, no it’s not
Sitting with the molluscs & anemones in an
Empty autumn enterprise baby you look pretty
With your long eventual hair, is love king?
What’s this? A sonnet? Love’s a babe we know that
I’m coming up, I’m coming, Shakespeare only stuck
To one subject but I’ll mention nobody said
You have to get young Americans some ice cream
In the artificial light in which she woke
Clap Hands
I’ll write you sonnets till you come
Home from school again, the music of your cave become
A stalagmitic presence, honey I don’t have
An electronically regulated discharge tube that can emit
extremely rapid, brief and brilliant flashes of
light, such a squinting and twisting around
as to disorder it’s nice to divide a sonnet
This way when you might fuck me up the ass
On account of the presence of the bureau by the door
Cause of some song like the one by Tom Verlaine
Where he says adieu like a kid from Brooklyn
Tell like so cause me Bill loves you to not to know
Turn the hear to why over Bill me cause I’ll know I you
Say and am to exist I not entranced pretty
Can’t Bill with startling say Shakespeare myself that
Couplet I adore you it’s my habit
I want manly things & should not, women come to me
Sonnet
For that which is not conscious, the
language provides no means of expression
—Gregory Bateson
You read about Uranus in the Times?
How there’s two more moons? & how the guys
In the neighborhood I grew up in got arrested
For killing a final cop and wounding a woman one?
She’s in stable condition, life is
Kind of hot if empty-seeming, don’t you think?
Me and the cop who arrested him have got alot in common
Not only cause of Ridgewood and cause his name is Angel
My Voyager, Uranus is far away as far as my pessary
From the magnetosphere forgive me cock
Gaea was born of Chaos in a phoneless prison
Let’s have a baby today, I gave
You a new name
The Phenomenon of Chaos
Love’s not intent today what did I see
A bank, a store, a pattern of leaves
Fallen to the basketball court because
Rain followed the smoke of eleven states’ fires
To exit from the universe you could
Believe nothing is checked on
But we don’t exactly exist do we
Otherwise how could we
Do you love me when the earth’s sun
Sets on your song on your tongue
This is ridiculous the universe
Is no longer uniform
By this we mean the universe’s not or aint
A standard of nothing love’s turning no more
Catullus #48
I’d kiss your eyes three hundred thousand times
If you would let me, Juventius, kiss them
All the time, your darling eyes, eyes of honey
And even if the formal field of kissing
Had more kisses than there’s corn in August’s fields
I still wouldn’t have had enough of you
Catullus #99
Honey while you played I stole
a little kiss, Juventius, sweet sweet
This didn’t go unpunished & from then I’m fixed
on the highest tearless crucifix
I make myself clear with my tears
it doesn’t work and you’re still mad
Once when we kissed you used your spit
to wipe your lips, oh your soft fingers
you looked like you thought you might get Aids
from the dirty kiss of this diseased whore
How come you always bring me love without rest
It’s all misery, you always torture me
that small kiss was the bitterest
And all you’ve given me since are punishments
handed out like medicines for miserable love
I’ll never steal another kiss
After Catullus and Horace
only the manners of centuries ago can teach me
how to address you my lover as who you are
O Sestius, how could you put up with my children
thinking all the while you were bearing me as in your mirror
it doesn’t matter anymore if spring wreaks its fiery
or lamblike dawn on my new-found asceticism, some joke
I wouldn’t sleep with you or any man if you paid me
and most of you poets don’t have the cash anyway
so please rejoin your fraternal books forever
while you miss in your securest sleep Ms. Rosy-fingered dawn
who might’ve been induced to digitalize a part of you
were it not for your self-induced revenge of undoneness
it’s good to live without a refrigerator! why bother
to chill the handiwork of Ceres and of Demeter?
and of the lonesome Sappho, let’s have it warm for now.
Large Imitation Classical Lune
Patricia my man
you disapprove of men
but when we fucked
you didn’t mind my boyishness
so very much
you said it reminded you
of my Sophia
now you and Beth attack
my new boyfriend
and say he hasn’t anything
to say plus
he’s just like other men
to idiot Bernadette
you say how I love
men takes time
from our conversations our privacy
but you don’t
feel that way about Maureen!
Laura’d be horrified
to know which she does
that I speak
of you two as one
but, girlfriends, remember
the sky’s the limit in
these risky questions
of friendship and of love
I’ve overcome all
my travel phobias, my fears
of enclosed spaces
I’ll go to Staten Island
I’ll go alone
Mommy and I aren’t one
but I won’t reform
I still wanna make love
to you two
as one and too, him
Hendecasyllables on
Catullus #33
You have the balls to say you will be with me
but you hardly ever are, then you say you’re scared
of your parents’ opinion, they pay your rent
I wouldn’t mind that if they didn’t think I
was a whore ridden with Aids disease & worse things
but I am I and my little dog knows me
in the most astonishingly bourgeois way
I even pay my self-employment tax now
and put leftovers into expensive tinfoil
to be used in imaginable tomorrows
therefore I protest my bad reputation
but I do wander all night in my vision
Catullus #67
CATULLUS:
O sweet delightful delightful door, a pleasure to the husband
and to the husband’s father, bliss for all parents
who have penises
Be in good health my door, hello to you, let Jupiter
or
God increase your self’s good works
Door who serviced Balbus well and once upon a time
While he still held his own old seat in the home,
that is, he lived
And to what extent, how much, do you bring bear carry
back and backwards to swim to stream to flow to serve
so badly
After the stretched out fact of the married man versus
the dead man
In the old sleepy house to have been so abandoned . . .
Why have you become so changed to us?
DOOR:
So it please, Caecilius, son of Balbus,
whom I now serve, I haven’t changed
nor is it my fault: it never was
No matter what anybody says
I’ve committed no sin
People will always blame the door
whenever a bad thing happens
Well, let them talk: I didn’t
CATULLUS:
It’s not enough for you to speak one word about that but
to do it so anyone can sense it and feel it and see it
DOOR:
How can I? Nobody wants to know the truth
CATULLUS:
Well that’s what we wish for: you have to tell us
things without a doubt
DOOR:
Well, first of all, she wasn’t a virgin
when she came to us
It was old Balbus himself who had her first
because his poor son’s limp dagger hung
like a withered beet that never even reached
mid-tunic; yes, it was the father got in the marriage bed
and defiled it
whether from pure lust
or simply the urge to do his son’s work:
somebody had to do the proper thing
and undo a married virgin
CATULLUS:
He sure was one extremely high frequency father-in-law—
you speak too well of him—this parent pissed on the lap of
the wife of his son or maybe he pissed in her belly or maybe
he pissed on her breasts or maybe he pissed in a holy way