from Ted Berrigan

        Words for Love

by Ted Berrigan 

        for Sandy

        Winter crisp and the brittleness of snow

        as like make me tired as not. I go my

        myriad ways blundering, bombastic, dragged

        by a self that can never be still, pushed

        by my surging blood, my reasoning mind.

        I am in love with poetry. Every way I turn

        this, my weakness, smites me. A glass

        of chocolate milk, head of lettuce, dark-

        ness of clouds at one o’clock obsess me.

        I weep for all of these or laugh.

        By day I sleep, an obscurantist, lost

        in dreams of lists, compiled by my self

        for reassurance.   Jackson Pollock  René

        Rilke       Benedict Arnold       I watch

        my psyche, smile, dream wet dreams, and sigh.

        At night, awake, high on poems or pills

        or simple awe that loveliness exists, my lists

        flow differently. Of words bright red

        and black, and blue.  Bosky.  Oubliette.  Dis-

        severed. And O, alas

        Time disturbs me. Always minute detail
        fills me up. It is 12:10 in New York. In Houston

        it is 2 p.m. It is time to steal books! It's

        time to go mad. It is the day of the apocalypse

        the year of parrot fever! What am I saying?

        Only this. My poems do contain

        wilde beestes. I write for my Lady

        of the Lake. My god is immense, and lonely

        but uncowed. I trust my sanity, and I am proud. If

        I sometimes grow weary, and seem still, nevertheless

        my heart still loves, will break.

        To me, here and now, this poem is perfect.

       It’s just right.  Any heavier and it’d have sunk.  Any fancier and it’d have broken.  I could read it once more, and still be pleasantly surprised; not unlike the smile that alights, when folding freshly cleaned sheets on a cheerful morning.

       

        I came across Berrigan for the first time today:

        People of the future

        while you are reading these poems, remember

        you didn’t write them,

        I did.

       

        Then I bursted into laughter.  True indeed.  It must be the greatest peril of being a poet: being outshined by your work.  

But joking aside, it takes a great poet, and serendipitous circumstances, for a readers to feel so deeply as if they wrote the poem themselves; when that happens, when this miraculous bond is formed, it might be the best compliment a poet could ever ask for.

        Was this simply a humorous forward?  Or did Berrigan really think so much of himself?