Read Online The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan by Alice Notley - Free Book Online

beneath feverous folds, flashed cool
    in our white heat        hungered          and tasted         and
    Gone to the movies       baffling combustions
    are everywhere!        like Gertrude Stein at Radcliffe,
    Patsy Padgett replete with teen-age belly!        everyone’s
    suddenly pregnant and no one is glad!
    O wet kisses, the poem upon the page
    Can tell you about teeth you’ve never dreamed
    Could bite, nor be such reassurance! Babies are not
    Like Word Origins and cribbage boards          or dreams
    of correspondence!       Fucking is so very lovely
    Who can say no to it later?
LV
    Grace to be born
    and live as variously
    as possible
    FRANK O’HARA
    Grace to be born and live as variously as possible
    White boats        green banks         black dust         atremble
    Massive as Anne’s thighs upon the page
    I rage in a blue shirt at a brown desk in a
    Bright room sustained by a bellyful of pills
    “The Poems” is not a dream       for all things come to them
    Gratuitously        In quick New York we imagine the blue Charles
    Patsy awakens in heat and ready to squabble
    No Poems she demands in a blanket command          belly
    To hot belly we have laid        serenely white
    Only my sweating pores are true in the empty night
    Baffling combustions are everywhere!       we hunger and taste
    And go to the movies           then run home drenched in flame
    To the grace of the make-believe bed
LVI
    banging around in a cigarette          she isn’t “in love”
    She murmurs of signs to her fingers
    in my paintings for they are present
    The withered leaves fly higher than dolls can see
    What thwarts this fear I love
    Mud on the first day (night, rather
    gray his head goes       his feet green
    Francis Marion nudges himself gently in the big blue sky
    Joyful ants nest on the roof of my tree
    I like to beat people up.
    Summer so histrionic, marvelous dirty days
    It is a human universe: & I
    sings like Casals in furtive dark July; Out we go
    to the looney movie         to the make-believe bed
LVII
    Patsy awakens in heat and ready to squabble
    In a bright room sustained by a bellyful of pills
    One’s suddenly pregnant and no one is glad!
    Aching to be fucked we fondle their snatches
    That the angels have supereminent wisdom is shown
    Days produce life locations to banish 7 Up
    A postcard of Juan Gris
    To swallow. Thus a man lives by his tooth.
    Buried his daddy and killed a many. Benito Mussolini
    The Asiatics
    Everything turns into writing
    And Gude is worrying about his sex life
    Each tree is introspection
    The most elegant present I could get
LIX
    In Joe Brainard’s collage its white arrow
    does not point to William Carlos Williams.
    He is not in it, the hungry dead doctor.
    What is in it is sixteen ripped pictures
    Of Marilyn Monroe, her white teeth whitewashed
    by Joe’s throbbing hands. “Today
    I am truly horribly upset because Marilyn
    Monroe died, so I went to a matinee B-movie
    and ate King Korn popcorn,” he wrote in his
    Diary
. The black heart beside the fifteen pieces
    of glass in Joe Brainard’s collage
    takes the eye away from the gray words,
    Doctor, but they say “ I LOVE YOU ”
    and the sonnet is not dead.
LX
    old prophets          Help me to believe
    New York!        sacerdotal        drink it take a pill
    Blocks of blooming winter.        Patricia was a
    bed          Patsy       gone        The best fighter in Troy
    Be bride and groom and priest:         in pajamas
    Sweet girls will bring you candied apples!
    Drummer-boys and Choo-Choos will astound you!
    Areté          I        thus I       Again I          I
    An Organ-Grinder’s monkey does his