In the Honest Here and Now: Being with Bernadette Mayer

Poetry State Forest is a strip of land with trees that Bernadette Mayer and Philip Good own between their home and a creek. It’s a good place to walk and you can read in the green chair there in any season. At one end of Poetry State Forest, where two creeks intersect, it is deep enough to swim, and in the summer the perfect place to sun and rest. Bernadette was a city girl who moved to the country, and I was a country boy who moved to the city, and at the intersection of those two creeks, we settled into our surroundings where the unexpected often happens when you’re watching what’s all around. Suddenly there was a kingfisher, or a heron, jewelweed and cardinal flowers. We talked of favorite authors, Catullus, Whitman, Hawthorne, intimate as lovers.

When it was time to swim, to get to the deep part, you had to go down a slippery slope of stones that could hurt you if you slipped and fell. Bernadette simply slid on her bottom, picking up large stones that hindered her path, and dropping them by her side into the rushing current. After her stroke, in the late 90s, doctors gave her the terrible news that it was likely she would never read or walk or talk again, but Bernadette listened to none of them. Though she could no longer write by hand, she could type, and after she moved upstate, closer to nature, her love of language with the language in her, continued to observe and report, often in shorter poems, the honest here and now. I remember once at the creek when I’d safely gotten up to my waist and was about to swim, I turned around and said, “It’s so beautiful, I think we’re in Eden.” “We are. I can see a snake,” Bernadette said, pointing to it peeking from the rocks, spreading out her arms, gliding by my side.