Bernadette Mayer

abide with me don’t ever abide gimme anytime a pile of leaf-hay across the field underneath the bright new blue tractor pulling the tedder which is the waffler or fluffer

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

Be strong Bernadette Nobody will ever know I came here for a reason Perhaps there is a life here Of not being afraid of your own heart beating Do not be afraid of your own heart beating Look at very small things with your eyes & stay warm Nothing outside can cure you but everything's outside There is great shame for the world in knowing You may have gone this far Perhaps this is why you love the presence of other people so much Perhaps this is why you wait so impatiently You have nothing more to teach Until there is no more panic at the knowledge of your own real existence & then only special childish laughter to be shown & no more lies no more Not to find you no More coming back & more returning Southern journey Small things & not my own debris Something to fight against & we are all very fluent about ourselves Our own ideas of food, a Wild sauce There's not much point in its being over: but we do not speak them: I had written: "the man who sewed his soles back on his feet" And then I panicked most at the sound of what the wind could do to me if I crawled back to the house, two feet give no position, if the branches cracked over my head & their threatening me, if I covered my face with beer & sweated till you returned If I suffered what else could I do

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 8 � 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 man and a woman pretend to be white ice Three men at the lavender door are closed in by the storm With strong prejudice and money to buy the green pines One weekend fisherman and blue painters watch The vivid violet winds blow visibility from the mountain Beyond the black valley. That means or then you know You’re in a big cloud of it, it’s brilliant white mid-February A week or two left on distracting black trees Before the brownish buds obscure your view of the valley again. Looking for company four dark men and a burnt sienna woman Come in for three minutes, then bye-bye like a gold watch left on the chair Or part of the sum of what big white families think up To store for long yellow Sundays to eat for brown ecological company. At some point later gorgeous red adventure stops, did you forget To turn it down and laugh in the face of the fearful white storm anyway Or picture it brilliant blue for a further Sunday memory In a coloring book, you talk as lightly as you can Refusing a big pink kiss, you burned the Sunday sauce Of crushed red tomatoes, you turn it down to just an orange glow. This particular storm, considering the pause and the greenish thaw before it Reminds me in its mildness of imitating a sea-green memory that is actually In the future, I imitate an imagined trumpet sound Or the brilliant purple words of a man or woman I haven’t met yet Or perhaps it’s a grey-haired man I already know who said some- thing yesterday To a mutual friend who will give me the whole story in black and white tomorrow Or the day after, just as the big orange plows for the local businesses Go to work to push away the rest of the white snow that will fall tonight.

A collaboration with Emma Lazarus Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! Give me your gentrificatees of the Lower East Side including all the well-heeled young Europeans who’ll take apartments without leases Give me your landlords, give me your cooperators Give me the guys who sell the food and the computers to the public schools in District One Give me the IRS-FBI-CIA men who don’t take election day off Give me the certain members of the school board & give me the district superintendent Give me all the greedy members of both american & foreign capitalist religious sects Give me the parents of the punk people Give me the guy who puts those stickers in the Rice Krispies Give me the doctor who thinks his time is more valuable than mine and my daughter’s & the time of all the other non-doctors in this world Give me the mayor, his mansion, and the president & his white house Give me the cops who laugh and sneer at meetings where they demonstrate the new uses of mace and robots instead of the old murder against people who are being evicted Give me the landlord’s sleazy lawyers and the deal-making judges in housing court & give me the landlord’s arsonist Give me the known & unknown big important rich guys who now bank on our quaint neighborhood Give me, forgive me, the writers who have already or want to write bestsellers in this country Together we will go to restore Ellis Island, ravaged for years by wind, weather and vandals I was surprised and saddened when I heard that the Statue of Liberty was in such a serious state of disrepair & I want to help This is the most generous contribution I can afford.

for: max and alyssa malyyssax worelish tomorrow we'll see the lightbulb in schenectady, go to gems farms in schodack, then on to howe caverns, then to see the wayne thiebaud show at the clark where we'll stop to notice the melting ice sculpture then excellent spinach sap soup at the thai restaurant in williamstown, a brief stop at the octagonal museum, on to northampton to see the smith college art museum & greenhouse where we'll see a green heron it would be nice to be able to walk today so we could go to opus 40 in saugerties followed by a dinner of oysters & mussels at the bear then on to check out the sheep at the sheepherding inn where we're able to buy riccotta cheese which means twice-baked, with which we're able to make a pizza with fresh figs gotten from the berry farm war what is it good for? absolutely nothing

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. To die, turn to page 172.

name address date I cannot remember an eye for an eye then and there my this    is your    se cond    ch ance    to h i s t o r y r e p e a t s i t s s e l f and a tooth for a tooth is a tooth:

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