The Obvious Tradition
By Bill Berkson
I haven’t remembered anything, only the names
and that their dates have been replaced by fees
toted up out of mischief:
a whopping yellow sun, finesse swallowed hard,
a scrapbook in pantyhose dawdling beside some Shreveport-like expanse.
But now you see it, she’s supposed to call.
Surely neither will converse, they merely tell,
succumbing to a disorderly shelf life like Tampax in June.
Salute the budding terminus where the East Side was.
Can there be a way to redefine the tense behind its jaunts,
the pubescent imagery a hand calls forth
as, rippling, it is thrust into the brine?
The phantom tugboat slips along
in depths past Garbo’s awnings and the united glaze
which wilts, harnessing dim signatories in the windows’ sarong.
Do things go further in need as I could? Or are they immune?
How else have I been taught to guess
and then been told to know, because matter equals good?
A silken light masks the entrance to the market proofs of time.
Copyright Credit: Bill Berkson, "The Obvious Tradition" from Portrait and Dream: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 2009 by Bill Berkson. Reprinted by permission of Coffee House Press.
Source: Portrait and Dream: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2009)