Milkweed Smithereens
New Directions, 2022
Dear Bernadette, I wish we could have this conversation in person, but I am confident the voices that speak with me for my poems will also lead me to you. As you say in your brilliant new book, “& in the quantum world / there is no causation, things / might happen differently from / the way you thought, don’t bother thinking / get on a deer, we could save the lions.”
MILKWEED SMITHEREENS is a masterpiece, I mean, another masterpiece! No matter what book of yours is in hand, sorcery, the best kind of devilry, gets delivered! You never faltered; all your auspicious life, you never stopped talking with your poetry spirits!
i won’t tell you why but if you could only see it!
where’s a moment? we are done for!
the bath of idiocy that precedes us to the waterfall
When I think of those irritating, contemptible men of your generation threatened by your genius, how did you protect your spirit? In your poem “My Parents’ Politics,” you say, “they seem to have ruined love & hope / with their dumb specific greed / i do not give up.” How did you shield yourself while keeping tuned to the poet’s frequency? They caught a woman on the train smoking in the bathroom. She said the nicotine put her in a good mood, and would they prefer her in a bad mood? She laughed at the conductor, and when she sat down, I showed her your poem where you say, “we’ll sit around pot-bellied stoves eating / the lobelias of fear left over from desperation.” The Cornell University Botanic website says lobelia has “structural similarities to nicotine.” Doris is her name, and she asked if we could smoke lobelia; I shrugged, and she offered me a cigarette for later. When I said I do not smoke, she said, “But they are so goddamned satisfying!”
Whenever I teach, I talk about your love of Catullus when I focus on the “intrusions” awaiting to halt our poems. You liked it when I said you could be the reincarnation of Catullus, and I think you would love my friend Jane Goldman's new translations of his work. You could be the reincarnation of the poet, who came back to write even better poems! Your strength continues to show us how to say Fuck You to every roadblock!
& then to swallow it
is enough to ruin swallowing
& hunger forever, mr. jesus christ
especially when your servants
put their cocks in my mouth
You talked about Basho and other traveling poets in Colorado when you discovered I had been living in my car for a decade. You asked, “Where do you have sex?” I said, “Everywhere!” You laughed, I laughed, and it felt so good to laugh with you. As you say in MILKWEED SMITHEREENS, “A slip of the tongue / Between my legs.”
It is Phil’s birthday, and may he swell with all the love today. Who knows better than Phil the places you sat, the way you sat, thinking and writing in a room? This great vanishing trick of death is overwhelming.
For what succeeds is silly maybe
For what succeeds is maybe silly
There might be nostalgia, emotion
There might be stuff unknown as death
Let something something something
Please, let something something something
My Buddhist friends say they accept death, but I say we should be in the streets protesting an end to the end of life! Can we end the end? What would cancel it out, bring your singular laugh back into this room? In your new book, you talk about Covid, saying, “the quarantine began on phil’s b’day, March 14.” Dear Bernadette, you resonate with us always! You write, “a memory is nothing / nothing is a memory // i wish i was something.” There is a poem in MILKWEED SMITHEREENS you wrote with Phil called “Carnival.” You or both of you wrote, “It was a sunny cold day when / yellow petals of tulips fell / on our table here and there.” I will scatter yellow today to remember you!