Six sonnets

American Poetry Review, The, May/Jun 1998 by Berrigan, Ted

XIV We remove a hand . . .

In a roomful of smoky man names burnished dull black

And labelled "blue" the din drifted in

Someone said "Blake-blues" and someone else "pill-head"

Meaning bloodhounds. Someone shovelled in some

Cotton-field money brave free beer and finally "Negroes!"

They talked. . .

He thought of overshoes looked like mother

Made him

Combed his hair

Put away your hair. Books shall speak of us

When we are gone, like soft, dark scarves in gay April.

Let them discard loves in the Spring search! We

Await a grass hand.

XXII

Go fly a kite he writes

Who cannot escape his own blue hair

who storms to the big earth and is not absent-minded

Who dumbly begs a key & who cannot pay his way

Racing down the blue lugubrious rainway

day brakes and night is a quick pick-me-up

Rain is a wet high harried face

To walk is wet hurried high safe and game

Tiny bugs flit from pool to field and light on every bulb

Whose backs hide doors down round wind-tunnels

He is an umbrella....

Many things are current

Simple night houses rain

Standing pat in the breathless blue air.

XXV

Mud on the first day (night, rather

I was thinking of Bernard Shaw, of sweet May Morris

Do you want me to take off my dress?

Some Poems!

the aeroplane waiting to take you on your first

getting used to using each other

Cowboys! and banging on my sorrow, with books

The Asiatics

Believed in tree spirits, a tall oak, swans gone in the rain,

a postcard of Juan Gris not a word

Fell on the floor how strange to be gone in a minute

I came to you by bus to be special for us

The Bellboy letters a key then to hear from an old

stranger

The Gift: they will reside in Houston following the Grand

Canyon.

XXVIII

to gentle, pleasant strains

just homely enough

to be beautiful

in the dark neighborhoods of my own sad youth

i fall in love. once

seven thousand feet over one green schoolboy summer

i dug two hundred graves,

laughing, "Put away your books! Who shall speak of us

when we are gone? Let them wear scarves

in the once a day snow, crying in the kitchen

of my heart!" O my love, I will weep a less bitter truth,

till other times, making a minor repair,

a breath of cool rain in those streets

clinging together with slightly detached air.

XXIX

Now she guards her chalice in a temple of fear

Calm before a storm. Yet your brooding eyes

Or acquiescence soon cease to be answers.

And your soft, dark hair, a means of speaking

Becomes too much to bear. Sometimes,

In a rare, unconscious moment,

Alone this sudden darkness in a toybox

Christine's classic beauty, Okinawa

To Laugh (Autumn gone, and Spring a long way

Off) is loving you

When need exceeds means,

I read the Evening World / the sports,

The funnies, the vital statistics, the news:

XXXIII

Ou sont les neiges des neiges?

The most elegant present I could get.

The older children weep among the flowers.

They believe this. Their laughter feeds the need

Like a juggler. Ten weeks pregnant. Who

Believes this? It is your love

Must feed the dancing snow, Mary

Shelley "created" Frankenstein. It doesn't

matter, though. The shortage of available materials

Shatters my zest with festivity, one

Trembling afternoon-night-the dark trance

Up rainy cobblestones bottle half empty

Full throttle mired

In the petty frustrations of off-white sheets

Ted Berrigan (1934-1983) was a well-loved New York poet, figure, and talker, the author of numerous collections of poems and book-length works of both prose and poetry, and a frequent collaborator with poets and artists. His range of styles, from the dense and monumental to the transparent and casual, have influenced many current practitioners. Books of his in print include Selected Poems Penguin, 1994), A Certain Slant Of Sunlight (O Books, 1988), Talking in Tranquility: Interviews with Ted Berrigan (Avenue B/O Books, 1991), and On the Level Everyday: Selected Talks on Poetry and the Art of Living (Talisman, 1997).

The following six sonnets were omitted from editions of The Sonnets, Berrigan's classic sequence from the early sixties, during Berrigan's lifetime. He had found them unsatisfactory but in 1982, shortly before his death, began tinkering with them and finally declared them to be finished. They are published here for the first time. The numbers at the top of the sonnets were previously lacunae in the numerical sequence of the eighty-eight sonnets. A new edition of The Sonnets will be published by Penguin-Putnam in March, 2000.