74 Friendship poems

I slumbered with your poems on my breast Spread open as I dropped them half-read through Like dove wings on a figure on a tomb To see, if in a dream they brought of you, I might not have the chance I missed in life Through some delay, and call you to your face First soldier, and then poet, and then both, Who died a soldier-poet of your race. I meant, you meant, that nothing should remain Unsaid between us, brother, and this remained— And one thing more that was not then to say: The Victory for what it lost and gained. You went to meet the shell's embrace of fire On Vimy Ridge; and when you fell that day The war seemed over more for you than me, But now for me than you—the other way. How over, though, for even me who knew The foe thrust back unsafe beyond the Rhine, If I was not to speak of it to you And see you pleased once more with words of mine?

John-O was given a key to the apartment. The deal was this: if Phil died suddenly, and John-O heard, he would rush on over, enter the apartment, leave unseen with Phil’s brown suitcase, and secretly pitch it into the mounded deeps of the city dump. Simply, there were things that Phil didn’t want to hurt his family with. Do you have yours? I have mine. The brown suitcase. Sasha’s sister, on her deathbed—dinky, frail, just a mild skim-milk trickle of a hospice patient— tensed, sat up, and unloosed such confessional invective that it seemed the walls and the sheets would have to be splattered in shit, her cancer having acted with the harsh, disbursing force of a tornado on the brown and hard-shelled suitcase in her electrochemical memory webs. Is yours secure? from love? from sodium pentathol? Last year, when a tornado hit our fringe of downtown businesses, the air was alive for counties around with the downward dance of naked canceled checks, handwritten notes, hotel receipts, e-mail transcripts, smeary Polaroids, a swirl of lacy underwisps that jellyfished the skies, and from The G-Spot Shoppe a rain of plastic pleasure aids, of which one prime example pierced a cow between the eyes and struck her dead. Maybe AIDS—I wasn’t sure. But he was dying, that was sure: as dry as a stick of human chalk, and making the terrible scritch-sound of a stick of chalk, in his throat, in the community air, in the room across from Sasha’s sister. Something . . .hidden in the trace of rundown aura still around him as we chatted there one morning . . . a tv? a sissyboy tv? I wasn’t sure, but it was obvious his life-chalk held a story not yet written, not confessed yet for this storyniverous planet. And when I remembered my mother’s own last days . . . the way a person is a narrative, the strength of which is either revelation or withholding. It was summer, and the garden at the nursing home was fat with summer’s pleasures: flowered mounds like reefs of coral, bees as globular as whole yolks. In her room, my mother disappeared a breath at a time, and everything else was only a kind of scenery for that. The wink of pollen in the light. The birds. Their feather-lice. The bursting spores. Those opened-up cicada husks abandoned on the patio —the small, brown, unlocked luggage that’s completed its work in this world.

Facing the wind of the avenues one spring evening in New York, I wore under my thin jacket a sweater given me by the wife of a genial Manchurian. The warmth in that sweater changed the indifferent city block by block. The buildings were mountains that fled as I approached them. The traffic became sheep and cattle milling in muddy pastures. I could feel around me the large movements of men and horses. It was spring in Siberia or Mongolia, wherever I happened to be. Rough but honest voices called to me out of that solitude: they told me we are all tired of this coiling weight, the oppression of a long winter; that it was time to renew our life, burn the expired contracts, elect new governments. The old Imperial sun has set, and I must write a poem to the Emperor. I shall speak it like the man I should be, an inhabitant of the frontier, clad in sweat-darkened wool, my face stained by wind and smoke. Surely the Emperor and his court will want to know what a fine and generous revolution begins tomorrow in one of his remote provinces... (1967)

for Jim Carroll, on his birthday A lovely body gracefully is nodding Out of a blue Buffalo Monday morning curls softly rising color the air it’s yellow above the black plane beneath a red tensor I’ve been dreaming. The telephone kept ringing & ringing Clear & direct, purposeful yet pleasant, still taking pleasure in bringing the good news, a young man in horn-rims’ voice is speaking while I listen. Mr. Berrigan, he says, & without waiting for an answer goes on, I’m happy to be able to inform you that your request for a Guggenheim Foundation Grant Has been favorably received by the committee, & approved. When would you like to leave? Uh, not just yet, I said, uh, what exactly did I say with regards to leaving, in my application … I’m a little hazy at the moment. Yes. Your project, as outlined in your application for a grant for the purpose of giving Jim Carroll the best possible birthday present you could get him, through our Foundation, actually left the project, that is, how the monies would be spent, up to us. You indicated, wisely, I think, that we knew more about what kind of project we would approve than you did, so we should make one up for you, since all you wanted was money, to buy Jim a birthday gift. Aha! I said. So, what’s up? We have arranged for you and Jim to spend a year in London, in a flat off of King’s Row. You will receive 250 pounds a month expenses, all travel expenses paid, & a clothing allowance of 25 pounds each per month. During the year, At your leisure, you might send us from time to time copies of your London works. By year’s end I’m sure you each will have enough new poems for two books, Which we would then publish in a deluxe boxed hardcover edition, for the rights to which we shall be prepared to pay a considerable sum, as is your due. We feel that this inspired project will most surely result in The first major boxed set of works since Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn! Innocents Abroad in reverse, so to speak! We know your poems, yours & Jim’s, will tell it like it is, & that is what we are desperate to know! So, when would you like to leave? Immediately, I shouted! & Jim! I called, Jim! Happy Birthday! Wake up!

My friend came and spent a weekend here. In China he used to be an interpreter and guide foreign mountaineers. He told me he had once accompanied a group of Japanese to a snow mountain in the Uighur Region. They climbed for a whole day but did not make the summit. A storm was gathering, so they turned back. On their way down, a young woman (the only one on the team) fell off a cliff and disappeared in the ice below. She was injured but not fatally. “Help, help me!” she yelled at the men two hundred feet above her. None of them went down, though they were all well trained. They listened and turned on a recorder. “Help, help! I’ll pay you ten million yen!” Her screams were kept on a cassette tape for her family and insurance company. “Those Japs are beasts,” my friend said. “If she were a Chinese I would’ve gone down to help her.” His story saddened me. After he left, the voice still lingered in my home— “Help, I’ll pay you ten million yen!” I don’t know if he could be so gallant to a Chinese woman as he claimed. I’ve begun to walk my dog every day.

A friend e-mails how much are you enjoying yourself? a dripping faucet loose cat litter no doubt about it a good world is difficult I say as if I were tilling a field ashamed of myself I apologize to the sleeping child

Talking to my friend Emily, whose drinking patterns and extravagance of personal feeling are a lot like mine, I’m pretty convinced when she explains the things we do while drinking (a cocktail to celebrate the new account turns into a party that lasts till 3 a.m. and a terrific hangover) indicate a problem of a sort I’d not considered. I’ve been worried about how I metabolize the sauce for four years, since my second bout of hepatitis, when I kissed all the girls at Christmas dinner and turned bright yellow Christmas night, but never about whether I could handle it. It’s been more of a given, the stage set for my life as an artistic queer, as much of a tradition in these New York circles as incense for Catholics or German shepherds for the blind. We re-enact the rituals, and our faces, like smoky icons in a certain light, seem to learn nothing but understand all. It comforts me yet isn’t all that pleasant, like drinking Ripple to remember high school. A friend of mine has been drinking in the same bar for decades, talking to the same types, but progressively fewer blonds. Joe LeSueur says he’s glad to have been a young man in the Fifties with his Tab Hunter good looks, because that was the image men desired; now it’s the Puerto Rican angel with great eyes and a fierce fidelity that springs out of machismo, rather than a moral choice. His argument is pretty convincing, too, except lots of the pretty blonds I’ve known default by dying young, leaving the field to the swarthy. Cameron Burke, the dancer and waiter at Magoo’s, killed on his way home from the Pines when a car hit his bike on the Sunrise Highway. Henry Post dead of AIDS, a man I thought would be around forever, surprising me by his mortality the way I was surprised when I heard he was not the grandson of Emily Post at all, just pretending, like the friend he wrote about in Playgirl, Blair Meehan, was faking when he crashed every A List party for a year by pretending to be Kay Meehan’s son, a masquerade that ended when a hostess told him “Your mother’s here” and led him by the hand to the dowager—Woman, behold thy son—underneath a darkening conviction that all, if not wrong, was not right. By now Henry may have faced the same embarrassment at some cocktail party in the sky. Stay as outrageously nasty as you were. And Patrick Mack, locked into memory as he held court in the Anvil by the downstairs pinball machine, and writhing as he danced in Lita Hornick’s parlor when the Stimulators played her party, dead last week of causes I don’t know, as if the cause and not the effect were the problem. My blond friend Chuck Shaw refers to the Bone- crusher in the Sky, and I’m starting to imagine a road to his castle lit by radiant heads of blonds on poles as streetlamps for the gods, flickering on at twilight as I used to do in the years when I crashed more parties and acted more outrageously and met more beauties and made more enemies than ever before or ever again, I pray. It’s spring and there’s another crop of kids with haircuts from my childhood and inflated self-esteem from my arrival in New York, who plug into the history of prettiness, convincing to themselves and the devout. We who are about to catch the eye of someone new salute as the cotillion passes, led by blonds and followed by the rest of us, a formal march to the dark edge of the ballroom where we step out onto the terrace and the buds of the forsythia that hides the trash sprout magically at our approach. I toast it as memorial to dreams as fragile and persistent as a blond in love. My clothes smell like the smoky bar, but the sweetness of the April air’s delicious when I step outside and fill my lungs, leaning my head back in a first-class seat on the shuttle between the rowdy celebration of the great deeds to come and an enormous Irish wake in which the corpses change but the party goes on forever.

That night we drank warm whiskey in our parked car beyond woods now lost to the suburbs, I fell in love with you. What waited was the war like a bloody curtain, and a righteous moment when the lovely boy’s spine was snapped, then the long falling into hell. But lately, you’ve been calling me back through the years of bitter silence to tell me of another river of blood and of the highland’s howl at dusk of human voices blasted into ecstasy. That night in sweet Lorain we drank so long and hard we raised ourselves above the broken places, mill fires burning red against the sky. Why is there no end to this unraveling.

After “Exile’s Letter” by Ezra Pound To Tom S. of Missouri, possum friend, clerk at Lloyd’s. Now I remember that you rang a silent bell By the foot of the bridge at the River “Thames.” With dull roots and dried tubers, you wrote poems and laments And grew more English month on month, bowing to kings and princes. Americans came drifting in from the sea and from the west border, And with them, and with me especially Everything was pig-headed, And I made hay from poppycock and painted adjectives, Just so we could start a new fellowship, And we all escaped our personalities, without expressing them. And then I was sent off to Rapallo, trailed by children, And you to your desk at Faber-Faber, Till we had nothing but China and silence in common. And then, when modernism had come to its worst, We wrote, and published in Po-Etry, Through all the one hundred kinds of shy and whispering silence, Into a poem of a thousand blank pages, That was the first heave; And into ten thousand poems full of Chinese reticence. And with chafing saddle and the bit in his mouth Out from the East came Confucius and his philosophy, And there came also the “True-man” Ben-it-o to awe me, Playing in the death-mask of Jefferson. In the botched houses of Europe they gave us more foetid music, Clanging instruments, like the sound of a myriad dying. My forefather Confucius got me drunk and I danced because my savage mind wouldn’t keep still Without his music playing, And I, wrapped in silence, woke up with my head on his lap, And my voice returning to me from every radio, And before the end of the broadcast we scattered like cards, or bombs, I had to be off to China, so far across my desktop, You back to your London-bridge. And our Roosevelt, who was brave as a rodent, Was president in Washing Town, and let in the usurious rabble. And one May he sent the soldiers for me, despite the long distance. And what with broken idols and so on, I won’t say it wasn’t hard going, Over roads twisted like my brain’s folds. And I was still going, late in the war, with defeat blowing in from the North, Not guessing how little I knew of the cost, and how soon I would be paying it. And what a reception: Steel cages, two books set on a packing-crate table, And I was caught, and had no hope of escaping. And you would walk out with me to the northeast corner of my cell, Toward the Alpine peak, with clouds about it as foul as London air, With you whispering,and with a bang, not a whimper, With glasses like dinner plates, glowing grass-green in the darkness, Pleasure-fasting, with women, coming and going without speech, With the dandruff-flakes falling like snow, And the hyacinth girls eating lunch in silence, And the sea, knee-deep, reflecting white eyebrows — Eyebrows turned white are an awful sight in the sunlight, Hideously aged — And the sea-girls singing back at us, Drowning in seaweed brocade, And the wind twisting the song, and desiccating it, Covering our eyes with dust. And this is the way the world ends. With a bang, not with a whimper. I went up to the court for prosecution, Tried standing mute, offered a madman’s song, And got no conviction, and went back to Saint Elizabeths Committed. And once again, later, you stood at the foot of my bed, And then the visit ended, you went back to Bloomsbury, And if you ask if I recall that parting: It is like the hair falling from my hieratic head, Confused ... Whirl! Centripetal! Mate! What is the use of talking, until I end my song, I end my song in the dark. I call in the nurse, Hold the pill in my hand As she says, “Take this,” And swallow it down, silent.

he lives in a house with a swimming pool and says the job is killing him. he is 27. I am 44. I can’t seem to get rid of him. his novels keep coming back. “what do you expect me to do?” he screams “go to New York and pump the hands of the publishers?” “no,” I tell him, “but quit your job, go into a small room and do the thing.” “but I need ASSURANCE, I need something to go by, some word, some sign!” “some men did not think that way: Van Gogh, Wagner—” “oh hell, Van Gogh had a brother who gave him paints whenever he needed them!” “look,” he said, “I’m over at this broad’s house today and this guy walks in. a salesman. you know how they talk. drove up in this new car. talked about his vacation. said he went to Frisco—saw Fidelio up there but forgot who wrote it. now this guy is 54 years old. so I told him: ‘Fidelio is Beethoven’s only opera.’ and then I told him: ‘you’re a jerk!’ ‘whatcha mean?’ he asked. ‘I mean, you’re a jerk, you’re 54 years old and you don’t know anything!’” “what happened then?” “I walked out.” “you mean you left him there with her?” “yes.” “I can’t quit my job,” he said. “I always have trouble getting a job. I walk in, they look at me, listen to me talk and they think right away, ah ha! he’s too intelligent for this job, he won’t stay so there’s really no sense in hiring him. now, YOU walk into a place and you don’t have any trouble: you look like an old wino, you look like a guy who needs a job and they look at you and they think: ah ha!: now here’s a guy who really needs work! if we hire him he’ll stay a long time and work HARD!” “do any of those people,” he asks “know you are a writer, that you write poetry?” “no.” “you never talk about it. not even to me! if I hadn’t seen you in that magazine I’d have never known.” “that’s right.” “still, I’d like to tell these people that you are a writer.” “I’d still like to tell them.” “why?” “well, they talk about you. they think you are just a horseplayer and a drunk.” “I am both of those.” “well, they talk about you. you have odd ways. you travel alone. I’m the only friend you have.” “yes.” “they talk you down. I’d like to defend you. I’d like to tell them you write poetry.” “leave it alone. I work here like they do. we’re all the same.” “well, I’d like to do it for myself then. I want them to know why I travel with you. I speak 7 languages, I know my music—” “forget it.” “all right, I’ll respect your wishes. but there’s something else—” “what?” “I’ve been thinking about getting a piano. but then I’ve been thinking about getting a violin too but I can’t make up my mind!” “buy a piano.” “you think so?” “yes.” he walks away thinking about it. I was thinking about it too: I figure he can always come over with his violin and more sad music.