The Poetry Project

Sarah Steadman

In the raspberry house there’s no money or landlords, shallots are the size of babies, and it’s warm and red as an Amaryllis. You love food better than anybody—fruit pizza, pike quenelles, and sorrel soup. Pound cake with one whole pound of everything. There’s a lot of creeks you love and people, as real as if they were your children or lovers. Every day I say in my head, “Be strong Bernadette,” because you are so good at laughing. You look very fine in your blue beret, slurping an oyster and joking at the weather. So many days fantasizing about what we want for dinner. You love leeks, you’re so picky. You’re the most alive dead person Bernadette, I love you. In all those blue herons, where two creeks meet, showing us nature and moss until there is no more panic at the knowledge of our own real existence. Send the iguana down the river, the shoe in the backyard, the blue mushrooms were incredible. Sitting on the front porch or the back porch, looking at the birds—Bernadette showed me lots of poems. A hummingbird moth or a nest in the rafters, a thunderstorm, or a bird in the chimney, that’s a significant event! Everything normal and joyful, with aura and a big joke. Bernadette hates astrology. When she eats oysters, she throws the shells in the middens in the backyard. Every Tuesday she reads the science paper. She will make you feel like you are a real poet. Kind of like Brook Farm, making fun of Nathaniel Hawthorne, or living in a horny phalanx, your poems of love for everything you see and what’s been and you still see. Bernadette with a real good belief in the earth, “steadfast as any farmer and fixed as the stars.”

Remembrances: Bernadette Mayer (1945–2022)

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