B.M.

On her summer writing desk is a blue electric typewriter (the brand is Coronet), yellow paper scrolled inside the carriage, opened letters, a short stack of books, including one by Dashiell Hammett, and four large bird feathers, probably from the wild turkeys with their chicks who paraded in the pasture all fall.

She thought it was hilarious that her initials were B.M.

I like to imagine that if I had gone to high school with Bernadette like Peggy and Grace did, I could have been mentioned in her long works like Studying Hunger, Memory, and Utopia.

When I saw Grace this fall, we drank white wine and talked. She’s got a great story to tell me about Bernadette (heavily pregnant with Marie) and Lewis’s wedding and an uptight priest.

Instinct tells me there is a biographer(s) for Bernadette already born.

Sometimes I cross reference the friends and lovers in her work. There could be five or more books open on my table.

On the day she came home from the hospital, Marie, Phil, and I were sitting with her on the porch when a box of the newly published The Letters of Rosemary and Bernadette Mayer, 1976-1980 arrived.

Bernadette was willing to drive with Phil, 1600 miles in a Jeep in July heat, to my wedding, even though she disapproved of marriage.

Bernadette and Phil spent the night in our apartment and I had the memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn next to the bed. She got a kick out of that and kept calling NYC “Suck City.”

“Are you okay?” And right after I said it, saw a look pass over her face, and I said, “Thank you Bernadette for not pointing out how stupid that question was.” She could have crushed me because of course, nothing was okay.

During the pandemic, we arranged East Village dropoffs to Phil and Bernadette in parking lots around the Hudson Valley in 3-degree weather: Venieros’ Italian cheesecake, Yonah Schimmel’s Knishes, and Russ & Daughters’ delicacies.

She mailed me an envelope of broken Easter egg shells, trolling me after I wrote in a poem that “I know Bernadette is alive because she leaves egg shells on her desk.”

In November, we watched Northern Exposure, an ’80s tv show set in Alaska, on video tape. In December, we watched Time After Time, a movie about H.G. Wells in his time machine pursuing Jack the Ripper to then-’80s San Francisco.

A sonnet by Bernadette and Phil, typed on yellow paper and signed with a golden thumbprint.

When the nurse asked about pain, Bernadette said, “It's complicated.”

My Turtle Island edition of Midwinter Day: the spine cracked from two decades of readings. The back cover fell off this December 21 at the marathon reading at Torn Page Parlor.

It's signed, and the B and M are merged and look to me like an elaborate garden gate.