Bill Berkson

Half-ended melodies are purer. To no longer perform in broad daylight, the apple’s a radish for it, the winter chill a living thing. But take your brother into later learning: Let the girls who will smell the buried cloves there. So I am only beginning to learn what I from time to time forget. But throw away these childish things! Barney’s coffin disappeared, and luckily you said the right thing for the sky mentioned for the last time. The little master of small talk is really the seducer of your every move, taking you into his confidence the way a cat his mouse. And still young Lycidas cannot express himself fully. And: “Everyone is the same,” even down to his jockey shorts,dolce far niente, as they say.

Crossed fingers gird the planet, though small optimism obtains. Will I read The Serious Doll in wraps, with its roller slur? A book where everybody, reader and writer included, dies. The kind of thing people said in the 1970s: “Hello, I’m back being me again.” My first and last names and the first and last names of both my parents have the same number of letters. The wasp waist, the tennis dress, the shirtwaist, the dirndl (Mainbocher). A distant yet achingly distinct whinny:et voila! the walking buckboard. Dustin Hoffman’s bookcase hanging by one hinge in air of Eleventh Street, dawn 1969. Telephone solicitation for a ballet school in need of “serious floors.” The thought of someone flat on his back on the carpet, tossing and giggling. If it hurts don’t do it. (There are several unless es to this caution.) For the second time in two millennia slept through the meteor shower, results of last night’s talk.

The sun met the moon at the corner noon in thin air Commotion you later choose to notice Love shapes the heart that once was pieces You take in hand the heart in mind Your fate’s consistent alongside mine Unless a mess your best guess That is right, thanks, the intimate fact that you elect it At corners, dressed or naked, with lips taste full body, time thick or thin, fixated Love, take heart as heart takes shape And recognition ceases to be obscure One line down the center another flying outward enters

Bunny Berigan first recorded “I Can’t Get Started” with a small group that included Joe Bushkin, Cozy Cole and Artie Shaw in 1936. Earlier that same year, the song, written by Ira Gershwin and Vernon Duke, and rendered as a duet patter number by Bob Hope and Eve Arden, made its debut on Broadway in The Ziegfeld Follies. By 1937, when Berigan re-recorded it in a big-band setting, “I Can’t” had become his signature song, even though, within a few months, Billie Holiday would record her astonishing version backed by Lester Young and the rest of the Basie Orchestra. Lovers for a time, Lee Wiley and Berigan began appearing together on Wiley’s fifteen-minute CBS radio spot, Saturday Night Swing Club, in 1936. Berigan died from alcoholism-related causes on June 2, 1942. Although “I Can’t Get Started” is perfectly suited to Wiley’s deep phrasing and succinct vibrato, she recorded the ballad only once, informally, in 1945, during a Town Hall performance date. The Spanish Civil War started in 1936 and ended in 1939 with Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s forces entering Madrid. “I’ve settled revolutions in Spain” goes Gershwin’s lyric, just as odd.

I It’s odd to have a separate month. It escapes the year, it is not only cold, it is warm and loving like a death grip on a willing knee. The Indians have a name for it, they call it: “Summer!” The tepees shake in the blast like roosters at dawn. Everything is special to them, the colorful ones. II Somehow the housewife does not seem gentle. Is she angry because her husband likes October? Is it snow bleeds softly from her shoes? The nest eggs have captured her, but April rises from her bed. III “The beggars are upon us!” cried Chester. Three strangers appeared at the door, demanding ribbons. The October wind . . . nests IV Why do I think October is beautiful? It is not, is not beautiful. But then what is there to hold one’s interest between the various drifts of a day’s work, but to search out the differences the window and grate— but it is not, is not beautiful. V I think your face is beautiful, the way it is close to my face, and I think you are the real October with your transparence and the stone of your words as they pass, as I do not hear them.

I haven’t remembered anything, only the names and that their dates have been replaced by fees toted up out of mischief: a whopping yellow sun, finesse swallowed hard, a scrapbook in pantyhose dawdling beside some Shreveport-like expanse. But now you see it, she’s supposed to call. Surely neither will converse, they merely tell, succumbing to a disorderly shelf life like Tampax in June. Salute the budding terminus where the East Side was. Can there be a way to redefine the tense behind its jaunts, the pubescent imagery a hand calls forth as, rippling, it is thrust into the brine? The phantom tugboat slips along in depths past Garbo’s awnings and the united glaze which wilts, harnessing dim signatories in the windows’ sarong. Do things go further in need as I could? Or are they immune? How else have I been taught to guess and then been told to know, because matter equals good? A silken light masks the entrance to the market proofs of time.

For Bernadette Mayer Just one more vintage movie, Batwings tonight at the Bal Masqué — Another creature stuffed By distinguished pedigree. I get a lot of madcap ideas about sentience, How knowing has you put down in the book Forbidden speech recognition — Else why make such a face? And now it’s luck no longer mouth that moves When fastidious rummage whispers To divulge a surplus A clue if not the key. Prospect my question laps up for good — I lean to it. Knowing you, First-person dwindle. Tweet-tweet. Prick.

Drown on all fours Pennies from a box flood the frump market Blasts of nacre, triage under weather’s speckled pool The idée fixe never happens yet can’t be ignored Still the moon is half full? Speak for yourself with your hands up The search is on Search and destroy, if you will Elimination starting with a lit fuse Vacuumed anon Your pleasure is the lee shore Thunder smites the tundra’s paw This should be memorable Legs whited out The runners advance

for Vincent Warren Behind the black water tower under the grey of the sky that feeds it smoke speeds to where a pigeon spreads its wings This is no great feat Cold pushes out its lust We walk we drink we cast our giggling insults Would you please leave the $2.50 you owe me I would rather not talk about it just now           Money bores me I would like to visit someone who will stay in bed all day           A forest is rising imperceptibly in my head not a civilized park I think it would be nice this “new moral odor” no it would not mean “everything marching to its tomb” The water tower watches over us            Is there someone you would like to invite        no one.

...  cantered light-heartedly downstream to their doom. — Patrick Leigh Fermor Somebody down there hates us deeply, Has planted a thorn where slightest woe may overrun. Disorderly and youthful sorrow, many divots picked at since Across the thrice-hounded comfort zone. Can’t cut it, sees permanent crones Encroaching aside likely lanes of executive tar All spread skyward. You got the picture, Bub: This world is ours no more, And those other euphemisms for grimly twisting wrath, A wire-mesh semblance bedecked With twilight’s steamy regard. Look at the wind out here. Delete imperative. Hours where money rinses life like sex, Whichever nowadays serves as its signifier.