all the poems you said you made
The Ballad of Theodore
I saw my father
and then he was here
and dressed in a suit
he asked for a beer
I hadn’t seen him
alive since 1957
dead I often see him
once in a while
He was all too calm
he was like a businessman
I got him a Moosehead
from the grocery next door
He’d walked into our school
daring and dead
“I havent talked to you in centuries”
“How good to see you,” I said
He put on the head of a power animal
this time it was the tall giraffe
my father then wore a longer cloak
& I was shaking hands with his hoof,
no kidding
It was quite a good time we had
he’d doffed the clothing of his absence
& no dead man is scared of being dead
& most of the living are full of this,
his form of innocence
We conversed, it wasnt startling
I was twelve when he died
his new disguises were a method
to let particular animals as grownups confide
He foreswore the walls of the school
and that’s where I lost him
no trick of time bemoaned his anxious fate
(I’m only fooling)
We drove cars backwards
ate acacia leaves, then
made witty conversation
wore bathing suits & swam together again
I lost him in the dream’s sudden regular twist
like he was an aristocratic woman
going from supper to a game of whist
instead of what he really was—an electrician
who loved Frankenstein
I saw my father Theodore
& then he was there
a vegetarian ruminant silent giraffe
full of his new & current perfect past
All dressed in a suit as if quite dead
but only at first, then as mammal animal
he asked me for a beer, he said
“Here death is not emotional”
Sonnet
Swell is the attribute of leisure
Found dead in immaculate house
I walked by you I walked
right by you, she read me
The pretty good poem of my father
I can hear the pen click, the pen
Makes noise, I do have to finish my work
For money, let’s count to six
And when at the beginning of a story
You I thank the blank rectangle of that blue
Fire escape experiment, it’s a color
You can see because darker in minutes
Ending sky then never met did not
if not of something done, then imitation
Mums
The lord is pregnant & we are not likely
to make her not so to open the window
in her presence is the fragile pot of
potent tea, the white lilies that are really
called tulips, the upbeat miniature mums yellow
red as the poison poinsettia he whose
flowers are actually only leaves—they all sit
on the frozen table like a big thin flag trying
out inventing happiness thru complication of abstraction
as if democracy could not not outlaw things
or if a man what no no man could a woman did not
there was an appropriate absence of identification,
this is no
secret message counted in ways time can afford
any average bunch of angels compare not to our lord
Failures in Infinitives
why am i doing this? Failure
to keep my work in order so as
to be able to find things
to paint the house
to earn enough money to live on
to reorganize the house so as
to be able to paint the house &
to be able to find things and
earn enough money so as
to be able to put books together
to publish works and books
to have time
to answer mail & phone calls
to wash the windows
to make the kitchen better to work in
to have the money to buy a simple radio
to listen to while working in the kitchen
to know enough to do grownups work in the world
to transcend my attitude
to an enforced poverty
to be able to expect my checks
to arrive on time in the mail
to not always expect that they will not
to forget my mother’s attitudes on humility or
to continue
to assume them without suffering
to forget how my mother taunted my father
about money, my sister about i cant say it
failure to forget mother and father enough
to be older, to forget them
to forget my obsessive uncle
to remember them some other way
to remember their bigotry accurately
to cease to dream about lions which always is
to dream about them, I put my hand in the lion’s mouth
to assuage its anger, this is not a failure
to notice that’s how they were; failure
to repot the plants
to be neat
to create & maintain clear surfaces
to let a couch or a chair be a place for sitting down
and not a table
to let a table be a place for eating & not a desk
to listen to more popular music
to learn the lyrics
to not need money so as
to be able to write all the time
to not have to pay rent, con ed or telephone bills
to forget parents’ and uncle’s early deaths so as
to be free of expecting care; failure
to love objects
to find them valuable in any way; failure
to preserve objects
to buy them and
to now let them fall by the wayside; failure
to think of poems as objects
to think of the body as an object; failure
to believe; failure
to know nothing; failure
to know everything; failure
to remember how to spell failure; failure
to believe the dictionary & that there is anything
to teach properly; failure
to believe in teaching
to just think that everybody knows everything
which is not my failure; I know everyone does; failure
to see not everyone believes this knowing and
to think we cannot last till the success of knowing
to wash all the dishes only takes ten minutes
to write a thousand poems in an hour
to do an epic, open the unwashed window
to let in you know who and
to spirit thoughts and poems away from concerns
to just let us know, we will
to paint your ceilings & walls for free
Say Goodbye to Legacy
you cant say
i think it’s just
the best thing
he gets in
i ever liked
the gap
this is where
i woke up happy
they wanna go
walking down the street
that kind of language
i found
not reasonable
as if everybody
gets in
so many fights
dolls like this
great burgers
the cocoon
girl shopping
to everyone
my lost sense
your boyfriend
takes cares of
so many fights
they’re not very
now say goodbye
I must’ve dreamed
I saw a dead guy
you learn from your girlfriend
your lost sense
has had so many girlfriends
their own money
cuddly to legacy
that i was happy
in a crowd of people
like take off your clothes before
you their
own money
so many fights
better than nothing
get into bed
Beginning Middle End
Rushed slowly up rushing stream road path
beginning at the interstitial meadow park
to see description we fell in past where
a recent tree had fallen bared wood color
of the mess of the pre-spring forest
Up & down root rock mud two-white-dot trail
right by Half-an-Abandoned-Smoked-Ham Corners
to the 2nd bridge where the postured guide escorted
9 times 9 some cynical hikers across, he shouted
“Space it!” We watched to wait to ask no destination
Cool air rushes to the hiking head by icier parts
Max straddles a downed tree to knock at dangling ice
Philip leaps to rescue my cooling blue bandanna from
small pools to small falls, strips a fine pine
walking stick, we hike back to watch methods
the dry dead grass; spray em with water like
houseplants; change them for other shoes
Roll back to city through thousands of households
of cars to home of reminders & dumb attempts at order
Experimentation in Rubrics
I red will not be good
I red will not do what I should
I red will at random rubricate
Your beautiful ass tonight
You are my specific sentence
You’re my first letter
My any A or letter else of any color
No one can hear our sounds
My words outloud are gone the sky’s
Lost its unknown animals now it’s
Black as the pen is law as are
So many centuries will pass before
You come home to my house I pray
You will conduct me glossily
In sex & its love proscribed
By all four of our parents
Tonight today now later
Like a title for a chapter
Of an illumined book
Manicatriarchic Sonnet
I am nothing but a list of things to do
this is not etcetera or red umbrella either
i think i did the things that might help others
for Marie for Danine for Wanda for the scifi writers
i started to write the letter about my new book of frowns
and then i stopped, mother, to see if you were around
only fooling you preventer of all my motion
i did though then want to see a big immobile tree
absent from the scifi histories of dignity
the way girls can talk without counting in
some fearsome sect of the absolute no one’d approve of
especially my bigoted parents who could love them
talk girls talk on into the night
there might be a second that rhymes with disaster
Marie Makes Fun of
Me at the Shore
for Bill Corbett
Marie says
look tiny red spiders
are walking
across the pools
& just as I am writing down
tiny red
spiders are
walking across the pools
She says Mom I can just see it
in your poem it’ll say
tiny red spiders are walking
across the pools
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the editors of the magazines and anthologies in which these poems and prose pieces have appeared: John Ashbery, Bill Berkson, Heather Booth, Cydney Chadwick, Laura Chester, Andrei Codrescu, Clark Coolidge, Michael Cuddihy, Bill DeNoyelles, Kenward Elmslie, Larry Fagin, Miven Findlay, Ed Foster, Peter Gizzi, Philip Good, Richard Grossinger, Bill Henderson, Jan Herman, Michael Lally, Gary Lenhart, Greg Masters, Connell McGrath, Tim Monaghan, Wendy Mulford, Charles North, Alice Notley, Ron Padgett, Michael Palmer, Todd Pinney, George Quasha, Tom Savage, Leslie Scalapino, Peter Schjeldahl, Michael Scholnick, James Schuyler, David Shapiro, Ron Silliman, Ethelyn Stearns, Chris Tysh, George Tysh, Anne Waldman, Barret Watten, and others.
Copyright © 1992, 1990, 1989, 1985, 1984, 1983, 1982, 1978, 1976, 1975, 1971, 1968 by Bernadette Mayer
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, or television review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As indicated in the Contents, many of the poems and prose pieces collected in A Bernadette Mayer Reader were originally published in small press books and chap-books. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors and publishers of Story (0 to 9 Books, 1968); Moving, Ceremony Latin (1964), and The Golden Book of Words (Angel Hair Books, 1971, 1975, and 1978, by permission of Anne Waldman); Studying Hunger (Big Sky, 1975, by permission of Bill Berkson); Memory (North Atlantic Books, 1975, by permission of Richard Grossinger); Poetry (Kulchur Foundation, 1976, by permission of Lita Hornick); Midwinter Day (Turtle Island Foundation, 1982, by permission of Bob Callahan); Utopia (United Artists, 1983); Incidents Report Sonnets (Archipelago Books, 1984, by permission of Peggy DeCoursey); Mutual Aid (Mademoiselle de la Mole Press, 1985); Sonnets (Tender Buttons, 1989, by permission of Lee Ann Brown); and The Formal Field of Kissing (Catchword Papers, 1990, by permission of Paul Cummings).
PUBLISHER’S NOTE: Very special thanks are due to Erik Rieselbach for his invaluable help with A Bernadette Mayer Reader.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First published as New Directions Paperbook 739 in 1992
Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Limited
eISBN 978-0-8112-2546-5
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation,
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011