Three Poems

Charles Bernstein

Dept. of English
S.U.N.Y. Buffalo
bernstei@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu

 

• Soapy Water

• Claire-in-the-Building

• Mao Tse Tung Wore Khakis

 

Audio clips here are in the .au format and were originally recorded at a reading by the author in Charlottesville, Virginia (September, 1994). Thanks to Pete Yadlowsky and HACK for conversion from analog to digital form. More digital audio poetry is available here. A sound-player for AIX 3.25 is available here. For Mac users, an .aiff version is available here; for PC-Windows users, a .wav version is available here

 

Soapy Water

 

From The Absent Father in Dumbo(Tenerife: Zasterle Press, 1991 — out of print).

audio clip [.95 MB]

 

 

You’ve got to be patient sometimes–sounds like an
anaesthetic, I’ll be the doctor–but jump up
into the next available hoop–Nick calling
“Where are my galleys” they can’t be lost
in the mail because they went Federal Express.
But something is always not there & if it’s
not apparent ingenuity (the mind’s perennial
ingenue) will think of it, rest enskewered.
These are the saltine days–salty & soggy. The
struts are finished, the shocks are leaking, &
like the man says, there’s always a simple solution–
simple & stupid. With the rug pulled out turns
out there was no floor. & float, flutteringly
behind or in bed with what salience has no
surety. The thing expressed–sounds like some sort of
pizza franchise, especially with the choices
now offered–broccoli, zucchini, Belgian sausage,
seven variety mushroom. No grade like the grade
that blew the gasket. Turns out to be
slop corridor, 7 days to shapelier nail filings,
was there sex before Catholicism?
It’s not as if an economy of loss is not in–
you can’t say circulation because it is kind
of anticirculation: all this nervous
energy dissipates production & erodes accumulation–
so you don’t have to get so dramatic, talk
about death & sex, or so moral, talk about idled
hours–all that you ever need to lose is wasting away in
anxiety’s natural spring geysers. So let’s
bury that knife, & in the morning we can
eat meat again.

 

Claire-in-the-Building

audio clip [2 MB]

 

There is not a man alive who does not
admire soup. I felt that way myself
sometimes, in a manner that greatly
resembles a plug. Swerving when
there were no curbs, vying
nonchalantly against the slot-machine
logic of my temporary guardians,
dressed always in damp
patterns with inadequate pixelation
to allow for the elan she
protested she provoked on such
sleep-induced outings in partial
compliance with the work-release program
offered as an principled advance on
my prostate subjection to
tales altogether too astonishing to
submit to the usual mumbo
jumbo, you know, over easy,
eat and run, not too loud, no
bright floral patterns if
you expect to get a job in such
an incendiary application of
denouement. My word! Ellen,
did you understand one thing
Frank just said, I mean, the
nerve of these Protestants, or
whatever they call themselves
or I ain’t your mother’s
macaroni and cheese, please, no
ice. Is sand biodegradable?
Do you serve saws with your steak,
or are you too scared to claim
anything? No can’t do. “I
learned to read by watching
Wheel of Fortune when I was
a baby.” By the time I was 5
you couldn’t tell the slippers
from the geese. That’s right,
go another half mile up the cliff
and take a sharp left immediately
after where the ABSOLUTELY NO
TRESPASSING sign used to be,
you know, before the war.
Like the one about the chicken
crossed the street because he
wanted to see time fly or because
he missed the road or he didn’t
want to wake up the sleeping caplets.
A very mixed-up hen. “No, I can’t,
I never learned.” By the time
you get up it’s time to
go to sleep. Like the one about
the leaky boat and the sea’s
false bottoms. Veils that part to
darker veils. So that the fissure
twisted in the vortex. Certain she was
lurking just behind the facade,
ready to explain that the joke had been
misapplied or was it, forfeited?
Never again; & again, & again.
“Maybe he’s not a real person.”
Maybe it’s not a real purpose.
Maybe my slips are too much
like pratfalls (fat falls).
Maybe the lever is detached from the
mainspring. The billiard ball
burned against the slide
of the toaster (holster). That’s no
puzzle it’s my knife (slice, life,
pipe). The Rip that Ricochets around
the Rumor. As in two’s two too
many. “I thought you said haphazard–
but if you did you’re wrong.”
If you’ve got your concentration you’ve got
just about everything worth writing home
that tomorrow came sooner than expected
or put those keys away
unless you intend to use me and
then toss me aside like so much worn
out root beer, root for someone,
Bill, take a chance, give till it
stops hurtling through the fog or
fog substitute.

Save me

So that I can exist 

Lose me

So that I may find you

“That’s an extremely unripe plum.”
“There’s no plum like the plum
of concatenation.” Plunge & drift,
drift & plunge. The streets are
icy with incipience.

 

Mao Tse Tung Wore Khakis

audio clip [.4 MB]

 

Who would have thought Paul McCartney would be
the Perry Como of the 1990s?
The Thunderbirds gleam end-to-end-to-end
in the studio backlot. The lions
have left their lair and are roaming just by
the subconscious. PP-warning: Illegal
received field on preceding line.
Bethel/’94: I just don’t want any
hippies come in here and steal
my computer. In my experience
I often misspell words. Evidently
Bob Dylan missed the exit and ended
up in Saugerties. You can sell some of
the people most of the time, but you can’t