Watching the Complex Train-Track Changes

To Men

You put on an ornate ballgown

You say “someone has to do it”

You take me to where you work,

The inside of a pyramid with chasms,

Watching the complex train-track changes

Products and objects make love to my father

Two babies are born—Bruno and Daisy

You take your shirt off looking boylike & lovely

You get on the plane, both clown & wizard

And then get off in a comedy of manners

Our dates become a comedy of dinners

Your name rhymes with clothes

Your plane folds & flies away

Without us, I’ll make the next one

We are enclosed in spaceless epics by breathless bricks

& still we’ll meet like runes or the leashes for hawks

Let’s go! Can we stay? Go to sleep.

A tree wouldn’t talk or weep if I-forget-what

And you in the train’s opulent rooms

Switch your cock to a baby and then say

“Must there (not) be a law against this?”

You add, “I have been thinking of you in my head”

You wear green glitter on your shirt instead of

A tie, that’s how I recognize you as you

You are the prep cook the sous-chef you make

Duplicating potato salad like the loaves & fishes

You create gorgeous paper-like sculptures of foods

We go down in the car through threatening snows

To arrive in a second to eat in a renovated place

You and I tell “what” we are at the end of a movie

Our podium of soft loud feet flies by accident

I take the train to your house to hear Shakespeare & Verdi

Everyone applauds when you walk in. The director

Holds up each actor & describes his physical being

I talk to your father but only by telephone

You have the royal blue 8 � x 11 notebook with the lock on it

I want one but you say you cant get them anymore

I walk twice through that city I’ve been in before

All through its rooms, its streets and its Commons

Copyright Credit: "Watching the Complex Train-Track Changes" by Bernadette Mayer, from A Bernadette Mayer Reader. Copyright © 1968 by Bernadette Mayer. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

Source: A Bernadette Mayer Reader (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1992)