Bernadette Mayer

It’s alot like a cave full of pictures & black & white checked flags you may overdose on caffeine it’s the closest restaurant to our house maybe five miles, it’s very cheap you can go there when you have almost no money they let you use the telephone i can get steak tartare there for $2.25 but i’ve never called it that just raw hamburger with an egg yolk, pickle relish & garlic powder plus the celtic salt i bring along the owner, h (after whom the h-burger is named) is loquacious, surprising, has a santa claus belly & wears suspenders there’s ashtrays everywhere & a great old pinball machine it’s like east nassau but it’s in west lebanon i think you can always talk about the weather & hunting the clientele is open-minded as are the waitress & waiter who kneels when he takes your order during hunting season it opens at 4:30 a.m. it’s for sale but that’s not quite serious h’s wife thinks he spends too much time there (which he does) so she started calling him by their dog’s name, peaches h is a big fan of northern exposure, oh & i forgot to mention the biscuits & sausage gravy which are genuine, greyish & great. recently h got a smoker & this year we’ll go to the new year’s eve party & eat stuffed shrimp and/or lobster

I saw another ladybug Chicago could win if  I eat the leftover fish & chips in every line so I don’t forget We went to the river called fish & chips We stayed at the fish & chips tower They donated a million dollars to the fish & chips foundation so we could go to school for free It’s called fish & chips college for women

First turn to me after a shower, you come inside me sideways as always in the morning you ask me to be on top of you, then we take a nap, we’re late for school you arrive at night inspired and drunk, there is no reason for our clothes we take a bath and lie down facing each other, then later we turn over, finally you come we face each other and talk about childhood as soon as I touch your penis I wind up coming you stop by in the morning to say hello we sit on the bed indian fashion not touching in the middle of the night you come home from a nightclub, we don’t get past the bureau next day it’s the table, and after that the chair because I want so much to sit you down & suck your cock you ask me to hold your wrists, but then when I touch your neck with both my hands you come it’s early morning and you decide to very quietly come on my knee because of the children you’ve been away at school for centuries, your girlfriend has left you, you come four times before morning you tell me you masturbated in the hotel before you came by I don’t believe it, I serve the lentil soup naked I massage your feet to seduce you, you are reluctant, my feet wind up at your neck and ankles you try not to come too quickly also, you dont want to have a baby I stand up from the bath, you say turn around and kiss the backs of my legs and my ass you suck my cunt for a thousand years, you are weary at last I remember my father’s anger and I come you have no patience and come right away I get revenge and won’t let you sleep all night we make out for so long we can’t remember how we wound up hitting our heads against the wall I lie on my stomach, you put one hand under me and one hand over me and that way can love me you appear without notice and with flowers I fall for it and we become missionaries you say you can only fuck me up the ass when you are drunk so we try it sober in a room at the farm we lie together one night, exhausted couplets and don’t make love. does this mean we’ve had enough? watching t.v. we wonder if each other wants to interrupt the plot; later I beg you to read to me like the Chinese we count 81 thrusts then 9 more out loud till we both come I come three times before you do and then it seems you’re mad and never will it’s only fair for a woman to come more think of all the times they didn’t care

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; failure 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

Bernadette: O sweet delightful house why do so many things get lost in you? House: Maybe you just dream you lose them. B: How do you know what dreams are? H: I pride myself on knowing everything you know. B: Oh, so you know we’re getting you new windows? H: I have trouble with no & know. With knew & new too. Why do people do that? B: I don’t know; I don’t mean I don’t no. H: See, you make it hard for a house. Anyway I don’t usually speak. B: Do you write poetry? H: I dabble. I don’t know if it’s poetry or prose though. B: It’s prose — it’s shaped like you. H: What about my roof? B: That would be a concrete poem. H: Even the time the tree fell through it? B: That would be a different genre, perhaps conceptual art. H: I’d like to climb mountains. You can leave me whenever you want but I’m stuck with you. B: What was it like when people prayed in you? H: It was kind of creepy. I liked the Jewish people better — more love of life. People can do anything they want to me, I’d like to be more proactive. I’m just stuck here. Even a cult could move in. B: I’ve never been a therapist for a house. How was your childhood? Were you born? H: I was made of mostly local stuff. Don’t set me me on fire. I tremble every time you light that wood stove. B: There was no heat when we moved into you; there were also 24 doors. H: Don’t blame me, I didn’t do it. B: You didn’t do anything but be here like an immobile tree, but you provided shelter. Can houses tremble? Do you have a sex life? H: None of your business. The sex life of houses isn’t known to humans, nor will it ever be. B: You seem to have mastered grammar but not homonyms. H: I liked it when I was unoccupied, full of birds’ nests on the porch & ghosts inside, I felt fulfilled. B: How did you like the Hebrew books? H: They reminded me of my bat mitzvah. B: You never told me you were Jewish. H: I thought you’d never ask.

Use a new conductor every time-out you have sextet—before foreshore, before pen name gets anywhere near any bogey opera glass (to avoid expulsion to any bogey flunkey that can carry infidel) Handle conductor gently Put conductor on as soon as pen name is hard be sure rolled-up ringworm is on the outspokenness. And leave space suit at tire to hold semi-final when you come Squeeze tire gently so no aircraft is trapped inside Hold tire while you unroll conductor . . . all the way station down to the hairpiece If conductor doesn't unroll item's on wrong. Throw item away Start over with a new onion

Ecstatic experiences with nature This is an automatic furnace Do not drop or roll Do not handle with squeeze lift truck Handle with care This is a piece of quality assured Home heating and cooling equipment The Ohio Valley Container Corporation Made its container to stand A resistance bursting test Of over 200 pounds per square inch Not an inch a metaphor, These words are on my window There is no pane, the first frost comes The second baby, we'll have to Turn up the heat, eat nothing And breathe through a rose Emulating the butterfly's patterns And the repetitive indifference of leaves Turning pink, color of the rose, so flushed Orange color, color of trees Ecstatic mists train us, no feeling No feeling, only moving beginning The pane crashed, baby falls Between loose pelvis onto the sheet Watches leaves blow wind onto window Ecstatic poets bend over, watch the thin doctor He's in the light, this is a chore or task Leaves blow the rose upside down up and down the street Interior blowing toward muscles and thighs Bending up and down, pictures of people The butterfly replaces the hat Every inch of the sheet is ironed Practice matches a new sculpture of thought in ephemeral stretching The space is no bigger than needed Air and water all around, pennies in water I foresee a taste for display in blowing up and down The crown describes only fantastic gems in air No loose signs of what the teas will do for you Fear a moment of taking longer than the warmth lasts The visitors and the coaches then speak of their intention For time to deny any atrophy or waste, even the giggles Later longer than warmth not in inches But in wrappings of leaves for warmth and evenness The warm colors, the cold blue curtains between the sun and the moon After pretension to be singly devoted to one's task is swayed to love Then the simple movement from inside to outside Become astonishment, red yellow orange and eyes bright Sophia Crystal foretells as I foresee absence of memory who sings eternally Only to sing more and more

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.