Serenade : Poems and Prose 1975, 1989

by Berkson, Bill; Brainard, Joe

• ISBN13: 9781581950168
• ISBN10: 1581950160
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-04-01
• Publisher: Pgw

Summary

Bill Berkson's many books of poetry include Saturday Night: Poems 1960-61, Recent Visitors, Blue Is the Hero, Enigma Variations and Lush Life. Long anticipated, the present volume gathers together most of his poetry and extended prose from 1975 to the end of the 1980s. An attentive critic as well, Berkson is a regular contributor to such magazines as Art in America, Modern Painters, Artforum, American Craft and Art on Paper. He lives in San Francisco and teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Bill Berkson teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Table of Contents

Basis	3	(1)
Cnidus, August 4th	4	(1)
Domino	5	(1)
Moon People	6	(1)
Star Motel	7	(1)
From a Childhood #101	8	(1)
Mother's Mother	9	(1)
Bubbles	10	(1)
Poem (``cutting brush...'')	11	(1)
Two Days	12	(1)
Voyage from Jericho	13	(1)
Familiar Music	14	(1)
Poem (``Old lady peering...'')	15	(1)
Baby's Awake Now	16	(1)
Duchamp Dream	17	(1)
Dream with Fred Astaire	18	(1)
Selected Dreams	19	(1)
Anti-Poem	20	(2)
To Lynn	22	(1)
``Lynn is putting...''	23	(1)
``old buttermilk sky''	24	(1)
Fourth Street, San Rafael	25	(1)
To Marie Cosindas	26	(1)
Tint Guard	27	(1)
Don't Knock It	28	(1)
Slow Curve, Hampton Road	29	(1)
Empire Edge	30	(1)
``Entraining to Southampton''	31	(2)
Lorelei	33	(8)
An Atlantic Door	41	(1)
On Ice	42	(1)
Drill	43	(1)
Try Again	44	(1)
After You	45	(1)
Ocean and Grove	46	(1)
Burckhardt's Ninth	47	(1)
Stamina	48	(1)
Annus Mirabilis	49	(1)
From Whence It Came	50	(1)
After 99 Comes 100	51	(1)
First Turns	52	(1)
Source	53	(1)
Stopping Is Nothing	54	(1)
Serious Moment	55	(1)
You Sure Do Some Nice Things	56	(1)
Poem (``How can equivocation happen...'')	57	(1)
Dark Middle	58	(1)
You Know What Crazy Is?	59	(1)
``Power goes off''	60	(1)
Instinct	61	(1)
End-of-Century Thrush	62	(2)
``The Hoole Book''	64	(2)
No Claim to the Puzzle	66	(1)
Algebra	67	(1)
Red Devil	68	(1)
11:59	69	(4)
Star Over	73	(28)
Broom Genealogy	101	(2)
If I Pray to Anyone It Is to You	103	(1)
On the High Window	104	(1)
Space Dream	105	(1)
Young Manhattan	106	(1)
15 1/2/34	107	(1)
Provincetown Light	108	(1)
Missing	109	(2)
Missing (2)	111	(2)
A Fixture	113	(1)
The Position	114	(1)
Chaloff	115	(2)
Ode	117	(3)
Chocolate Chocolate Chip	120	(1)
Under a Cloud and After the Waves	121	(1)
Night Straits	122	(1)
At the Skin	123	(1)
Chasing the Slip	124	(1)
Serenade	125

Excerpts

Chapter One

    Basis

They index mosaics

Of who they have agreed to meet and operate

Out of webs of future nut-nurtured void

Denigration would be constant

I forgot whom I was speaking to for an instant

And would have been a bad boy

Had there not been brevity and merit in another

As the corner is a quarried conviction

Head bang over walls, chair

Cnidus, August 4th

       for Larry Kearney

I put the candy in your hand and returned to my bee-watching.

Stamina could use tempo as a near-moral qualification.

Pleasant buzz, frightful sting. The melteme , bad wind, that

forced him to travel the lower coast of Turkey -- Lycia,

Anatolia, Castellorizzo -- instead of the better-mythologized

islands of Greece. Arcana accessible via salt marsh. And that's

where Saint Nicholas was born. "Me curator!" with a hip of

0.38 so's you don't take the pictures, tesselated, from the floor.

The door got repaired by adding to it. What he took to be the

sea as the overview of the Delphic oracle was an olive grove -- groves ,

really, sea-green, extending the slope to the real sea a

few miles out. "Wuz ya ever bit by a dead bee?" "Did you get

my rubber gloves?" The oracle put two dollars' worth of regular

in the Volkswagen and spun off, mildly.

      My voices always tell me when it's time to move,

and where.

    Domino

Mother and son are playing dominoes on the floor

in the cool of a bright late autumn afternoon, upstairs

of the little country house they live in. It is very

intent, like the eucalyptus. Two cats, male and female,

turn and jell on the patchwork Vermont bedspread. This

is northern California. Every ten minutes or so, one of

the players shouts out "Domino!"

    Moon People

Two blue figures

synchronized to move

toward a blurred point

across the barest space imaginable --

will they make it?

    Star Motel

Inside I could hear

a party of people,

the aimless cars

and in the middle distance

inexorable murmurs

of the ice machines.

    From a Childhood #101

"You think the world

revolves around you."

I do.

Therefore, it does.

Had there been a piano in that room,

I would have studied it.

    Mother's Mother

a photograph of

my mother's mother

aged about 22

delicate oval face

cocked to one side

her light-colored hair

tied back in a kind of bun

bright steady eyes

on the back she wrote:

"Your little wife Helen

Dec. 3, 1883

In summer or winter weather

Happiness means to be together"

then

"Married to Clay Lambert

Aug. 9, 1883

Photo taken Dec. 1883"

then

"Your mother

When she was young --"

    Bubbles

I was a bathing beauty in The American Venus .

My dream of becoming a great dancer: How sweet he was then,

a brilliant, laughing young man of the world, his heart

so tender: "Get married!" I cried, bursting into fresh black

tears. Glittering white sequins: I put no value on my beauty.

Somedays I thought I would run away from Hollywood forever -- to

Miami to Havana to Palm Beach to Washington, D.C., no less!

Now we are in the air, warriors of the sky, burning the beans

and Wanted for Murder: No rehearsal, no retakes:

His actors cry real tears: He wanted Dick to cry too and

Dick was not a spontaneous weeper: Breaking out of his grasp,

I grabbed a shotgun and killed him with dramatic swiftness.

That developed his character: Stars shimmering by beasts

in the black sky: His jaw muscles hunched closer to deliver

his monolog: "You're a lousy actress and your eyes are

too close together." I shoved him away, saying "Are you

trying to make love to me?" "Why not?" he said furiously,

jumping up and backing away to the door to make his exit.

"You go to bed with everyone else -- why not me?"

    Poem

cutting brush with a machete left

eye white cornea gets poked by twig

that was haste now abrasion seen

by doc who treats

eye-patch on and codeine in

codeine trips the psyche

home to daybed stretch

sentences that might be catchy slip

behind slow swirls magenta green

left eye watches patched

sea sky flakes magenta green

bird-size fruit flies slice

hotdog dinner right eye salted

watches sundown then "One Day at a Time"

    Two Days

1.

Today is unsurpassed.

Rain in winter's jowl,

People in ponchos slogging through elephant fog.

"Your phone." "Don't I know it."

And somewhere out there a misplaced fire poker

gathers rust.

Here air, there water.

Formality unbidden spreads edgewise or else

completed a quarter-mile up where vines creep and pry

into bathroom boards. The grass grows.

2.

"Glass of retsina at Bill's ..."

Fake dreams, reddened heat orb.

A word for the day abstains,

a trick mending. Pup gets bumpered, limps away.

Something we could do together, not sure what,

sitting and talking, aimless, adroit.

A day for obstinate, day for construe,

day the color and duration of a line by Jimmy

Schuyler in the anthology which says "I have nothing to say"

and stays bright and cold.

Voyage from Jericho

      for Steve Emerson

Tying laces baby brown moccasins

Moses wants another strawberry

His lucky day, letter to Alaska

Set to mushing, Clover Lane

Our man in Anchorage, down chute in thaw

To bound and boo in heavy mountain cloud

Dishtowel bib face chortles prime for nap

Elsewhere's codeine, grazed harmonics, empty pipe

Swish, swiveling Alaska, land of land of sea

"Ready to dig a hole and get in it"

    Familiar Music

A pair of dark blue panties

among hairbrushes.

    Poem

Old lady peering into her P.O.

box -- pink sweater, plaid skirt,

wire-rimmed granny glasses --

muttering "Harry ... Harry ... Harry ..."

    Baby's Awake Now

And now there is the lively sound

Of a panel truck heading due southwest

Along Elm Road, edge of dusk --

The densest light to see to drive by.

The underbrush has brown fringe

And small silent birds.

I saw the rainbow fire.

I saw the need to talk.

I saw a unicorn and a red pony.

And I didn't want any deviled eggs.

I drove home with my collar up.

We're alive. You do alarm me to the fact.

The light is on the window in the air,

And breath comes faster than the hounds

To sanction what remembered, what stuck.

    Duchamp Dream

Marcel Duchamp and I are collaborating on a giant wall

painting. Duchamp's part in this work consists of a talking

portrait of himself -- a profile which appears at the center of

a brightly colored rectangle on the white wall. Using a long

stick to push the colors around, I demonstrate the niceties of

the composition to a large audience standing in semicircle

around me. "You see," I say, "we (Duchamp and I) are much

the same -- but mostly at the edges!" Now the righthand

edge of the rectangle explodes in a flashing white light which

then "bleeds" into a field of dazzling pellucid orange. The room

during this phase of the work has been almost totally in the

dark -- the only light source being the painting itself -- its

colors illumined from the inside. Now the room lights up and

I am painting the four walls, running back and forth like crazy

with my stick. In one corner I draw a huge black gorilla figure

and pivoting to face the next long wall, I trace a black line

punctuated with a thick gob of paint which sticks out like

a fist. I pause, sensing this work is "a great success."

    Dream with Fred Astaire

I'm in a large movie theater. I go to the john.

Standing at one of the urinals next to me is Fred Astaire.

He zips up his pants and says "I'm a loser!" I look deep

into his sunglasses, their mirrored lenses, and I say

"Oh you're doing alright!" He is visibly moved by the

open-hearted and believable way I say this.

    Selected Dreams

    At the airport with dark glasses.

    Writing a master's thesis on the city of Nice.

    A duel with electric irons as weapons.

    Meeting Stuart Perkoff.

    The Celeste Holm Sisters.

    Anti-Poem

dust from windbag clots

days the human brain

scatters mostly

in a dry haze

over hill and sky

and love's colors

hardly distinguishable

from hay fever

sift

thus in a dream

I carry a white bucket

of shit and water

spilling some solid matter

into my vest pocket

and the villain played by Victor Jory

primps

and makes obscene remarks

whereupon I bop his

long bony nose

to a bloody pulp --

a fine moment of anti-philosophy

perhaps

but in the morning you are strange

Copyright © 2000 Bill Berkson. All rights reserved.