44th Birthday Evening, at Harris’s
By Ted Berrigan
Nine stories high Second Avenue
On the roof there’s a party
All the friends are there watching
By the light of the moon the blazing sun
Go down over the side of the planet
To light up the underside of Earth
There are long bent telescopes for the friends
To watch this through. The friends are all in shadow.
I can see them from my bed inside my head.
44 years I’ve loved these dreams today.
17 years since I wrote for the first time a poem
On my birthday, why did I wait so long?
my land a good land
its highways go to many good places where
many good people were found; a home land, whose song comes up
from the throat of a hummingbird & it ends
where the sun goes to across the skies of blue.
I live there with you.
Copyright Credit: Ted Berrigan, "44th Birthday Evening, at Harris’s" from The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan. Copyright © 2011 by The Regents of the University of California. Reprinted by permission of University of California Press.
Source: The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (University of California Press, 2011)