Muse
At Ho'opika Point
Haiku for the Dead
Sal Paradise Laments
Cheever in Westchester
Kerouac in Paris
The Boat
Ghost Love
someone tweeted f. scott fitzgerald reciting ode to a nightingale
Last Rites
Women in Their Beds
Diptych
Word Man
for daniel berrigan
It’s gratifying to suppose that
even the most unreflective
soul endures a little perplexity.
Not so useful that
our lives get mired
in moral stalemate.
Demons flourish on
the dead meat of
the well intentioned.
So she spoke: full of days
and journeys and beatings
and
prisons, yes, and God.
She came with questions.
How much longer can we ignore the turtles?
This was last night.
I hadn’t seen her for years.
You never come around anymore.
I live on Maui now, I told her.
Her voice was off.
I didn’t know from turtles.
Maui, yeah. I know. Boring.
An impressive likeness of her
Jersey grrrl voice. Some new AI.
I bowed to the ache of her empty form.
Her neck was crooked and dusty.
In 2011 she had a baby.
The husband retreated to a shame
cave in Amangansett. Enter: Me.
She’d call at 3 am. Where are you?
Tribeca, she’d say,
her voice on fire.
What followed was a summary
of a book of circles she was writing
in her head. One night in Union Square
I walked her into rehab.
Do you remember the time
you asked me to marry you? Sure, I said.
I remembered that she didn’t answer.
I’m sorry about not visiting before I moved.
That was crazy time, I said.
I hated the thought of her cold
in her grave. Earth is not a blanket
no matter what the poets say.
Turtles are not like snails.
Her teeth had rotted but she
flashed a bony smile
Snails leave traces of their insides
when they move through your garden.
Turtles live in anxious homes they build
around themselves.
I drove to Ho’okipa Beach.
Twenty turtles plopped in the sun.
One straggler waited in the wash for the next wave
to carry him to the sheltering rocks.
The others dried their shells in the brutal sun
to kill the algae. I waited for her return by the sea
until dark, listening to the North Pacific’s
ghostly groundwater of lamentation
praise and laughter.
Pari Berk, 1973- 2021
at the jersey shore
kids balance balls, roll strollers
sea gulls stall in flight
*
black waves of mussels
the girls in their summer clothes
sun sinking westward
*
a montclair book store
you sit reading on the tragic steps
glasses freckles nose
*
white connecticut
house with busted memories
i want to hold you
*
if grief could burn out
we would stay up all night long
stirring the coals cool
*
time darkens nothing
through forgotten centuries
undisturbed embers
*
pari & gary
long miles between us now
they do not matter
Each town has a street that ends in the sea,
Broken steamboat, the grass, the endless poem.
If it wasn’t for Dean, I’d be better at me.
Dean ran off with a girl, said meet me at three,
Frisco is covered with layers of foam.
Each town has a street that ends in the sea.
Marylou, Dean & me added to three,
I hitched back to Denver prepared to roam.
If it wasn’t for Dean, I’d be better at me.
King David’s son Absalom hung in a tree,
While Solomon’s son was called Jeroboam,
Sons split up all kingdoms quite literally.
We rolled up the night and stood up to pee,
Looked in the mirror and threw away the comb.
Each town has a street that ends in the sea.
The search for Dean’s father turned into a spree,
But after a toot the heart turns toward home.
Each town has a street that ends in the sea.
If it wasn’t for Dean, I’d be better at me.
The choice of love is open till we die,
Beauty like terror is not final here.
Carry the sun in a small golden cup.
The angel chorus got stuck out in Rye,
Some writer laments that he is small beer.
The choice of love is open till we die.
Poor Neddy Merrill gave swimming a try,
He swam the county, drenched trousers with tears.
Carry the sun in a small golden cup.
His brother had come to say his goodbye,
All down the beach heavy salt air blew fair.
The choice of love is open till we die.
But what can you do with a man who won’t try?
Naked women walk from the sea to the pier.
Carry the sun in a small golden cup.
Kings in gold mail rode elephants from Versailles,
New York’s river light can dispel all our fear.
The choice of love is open till we die.
Carry the sun in a small golden cup.
Bring me a Breton girl with seagreen eyes. Wearing a white knit sweater, golden bracelets, romantic raincoat. Not now. First, I must find the liquor man, the counterman. I have written much less than most people who write; I have drunk much more than most people who drink. My new friend Guy buys me another. Call no man happy until he dies, says he, or is it the Greek chorus in my Oedipushead? Where is Guy? Vamoose. My poor loneliness went unnoticed in the crashing busy night when all cows are black, and the owl of Minerva takes flight only at dusk. Tant pis. Neverthefuckingless. It was achievement we were addressing here, or its sober cousin, regret. Slip down to the corner to have a cognac amid the smash of cash register and racket of glasses swimming in soapy water. Off to play pool in the back room. The black ball clocks in the pocket and the cue ball leaps onto the stairs. Unshaven, in a black raincoat with rain hat I go sploopsing the dark streets. I dream of a lone granite farmhouse, lights on in the kitchen, a vague hint of hills and moons. I think of Dean Moriarty, Carlos Marx, Victor in Gregoria and old Bull Lee, a crazy choir of baritones and tenors singing like sad angels.
J was swaying and smiling on the phone. I love you! she said. Her iPhone flashed in my direction as she killed the call. I’m sorry, she said. I don’t mean love, love. You know, how with your ex sometimes you get gushy? You’ve got the kids together, and everything, it’s all custody, God, that’s a loaded word. Do you want a drink? I nodded yes, and she got me one. She came back into the living room and sat in my lap. Her hair landed on my chest. It smelled good. A few strands of her hair had gotten into my mouth. I removed them and sipped my wine. J said, you know what I mean, though, right? You love your ex, right? Well, not actively, I said, Z was more like a shipwreck that happened in another state, somewhere off the coast, police report filed, lawyer fees paid. We’re over, I explained. I’d moved back to New York. I was all about the new start. J nodded. This was our first date. You had a boat, she asked. Well, no. I mean, not a boat, boat. I kissed her. She moaned and tilted her head back. Her lipstick was smeared and her mouth smelled like flowers and chocolate. She pulled me deeper into the kiss and I wrapped my arms around her. Thanks for the drink, I said, emerging from the kiss. Oh, she said, you need another. J grabbed my glass. There was a half-inch of red wine at the bottom. She hopped off my lap and went back into the kitchen. I surveyed the living room. There was an enormous LG mounted on the wall. Mounted by the husband, I guessed. What’s his name, I called out. Your ex. Mike, she said. She pranced back in the room and handed me my drink. We clinked glasses. Did you enjoy romantic nights out in your boat, she asked. Just then, J’s phone rang. It’s my mother, she mouthed. I whispered back, OK. I don’t know why I whispered; she was already out of the room. I glanced back at the TV. It was enormous. I wondered what the ex did and whether he was the one maintaining the house, which also looked enormous. I had had trouble finding the house. She’d texted me the address, but when I parked in the driveway and rang the doorbell, and a woman opened the door, it wasn’t J. Sheepishly, I asked the non-J woman if she knew a woman named J. I also supplied the last name. The woman looked at me quizzically. Um, maybe down the street, she said. She pointed west. I got back in my car and texted J. She texted back another address. Only the last digit was different. I drove about a hundred feet to her house. With me in the car were three bottles of wine. I lived about five miles from her house. I was mid-drive, going over to see her when she had texted, Bring Wine! I didn’t know what she liked and didn’t want to spend the night texting, so I had gotten an expensive red, a white, and a bottle of champagne. We were drinking the red. She’d shook her head no at the champagne. I was trying to discern this when she drew me into a kiss at the door. That had been about fifteen minutes ago. Now, she was talking to her mother on the phone, trying to get her off the line without giving anything away. I knew what that was like. My mother asked me all the time if I was seeing someone. The answer was always no. J was back. She handed me another drink. We clinked glasses. Her lipstick was on my glass. She must have gotten them mixed up in the kitchen. I wondered how old the TV was. And whether the ex had been responsible for the pool I could see outside in the back yard. The yard was covered in snow. The pool was also enormous. From where I was sitting, I could not see the end of this pool. Do you swim, I asked. Do you still have the boat, she asked. We had both spoken our questions at the exact same moment. We laughed at that and clinked glasses. I tried to describe the boat.
for pari
I
It took years to locate you. Your flesh not a dreamt of destination but our point of departure, most often in a hotel room in Tribeca. Your coiled body flared like an apparition, calling me to come, and please leave. Your face made up with desire, both shelter and storm. To sleep here on Duane Street, together.
For what in our single beds would we have ever known of poetry?
II
What I did not know when I was young was that nothing can take the past away. You taught me the meaning of unpredictability. In each moment what you were about to do was unknown and this delighted us both.
III
I felt the need to disappear; you were someone easily disappeared, unformed and chaotic, a body flared in light then lost in shadow. I wanted to lose myself, you wished to remain lost.
IV
Separated, unhappy, we were expert at taking. We knew how to look distance in the mouth, to judge pain by its teeth. Two hearts to carry it all, harvests, coffins, water, roads, flowers, trees, earth mounded up around your open grave. Our freight, your ticket. The price was high. We made the language quiver.
V
The opposite of love is not hated but separation. Love and envy glued us together. Love aims to close all distance, but death gets the job done. I don’t know where you came from. I’ve no idea where you’ve gone.
someone tweeted f. scott fitzgerald reciting ode to a nightingale
poor son of a bitch
he recorded it in his last year
forty-four with skin like paper
probably in a self-recording
phonograph booth in LA
or somewhere in southern california
where the light is a daily reminder of all
you cannot have
like zelda in custody
his own private paradise
lost a thousand times or more
and he recites from memory this—what?
this ode gone off the rails
the keats is unmistakable but he begins in
such a low key
his voice the hushed tone of priests
even at his death he dreamed of death
and every art a sacrament
did people once believe such things?
scott did
he wrote to get the girl
and look!
the girl was got
and unstoppable fire
made her a torch
she burned alone
on the mental ward one day
if the river was whiskey
it only went downhill
their journey was beautiful & damned
but now you listen
as he begins well
the words barely breathed
his voice pure purchased princeton
the meter the line the exquisite pain
of knowing his last flight
like the nightingale he laments
will set hell on fire again
my heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains
my sense as though of hemlock I had drunk
o scott! o zelda!
we could drink a case of you
that i might drink and leave the world unseen
and with thee fade away into the forest dim so then
fade far away dissolve and quite forget
what thou among the leaves hast never known
the weariness the fever and the fret
here where men sit and hear each other groan
but scott has stopped reciting
he lost his place
his neurons misfiring again
he stumbles to a line he thought he'd never forget
and ends the poem in the middle
no second act or third only this last fragment
where youth grows pale and spectre-thin and dies
Someone I know is dying, but aren’t we all?
I’d go to her if I could.
When someone is dying, words seem unnecessary.
Also: punctuation.
Someone I met at a bar in New York City is dying.
Is there time for one more drink?
Some people were shot in a grocery store with a funny name.
What was in their shopping carts?
A woman I met at a party fifteen years ago with colon cancer.
Is it too late for another tragic woman?
She curled up beside me on the floor of the bar.
Overwhelmed and drunk.
Tiny black and gold angels sat on her shoulders.
They sang lullabies to her until dawn.
I’d tell her, if I could, about the angels and lullabies.
I’d say, there was gaiety in our defeat.
In the beds of women all my life I sought to sleep like God in France.
I visited Jodi, she’d collapsed sideline at her daughter’s soccer game.
I wanted her to know that all our stages had been small ones.
Jodi lay dead on a narrow gurney curtained off the hospital hallway.
I once slept in the bed of a friend whose mother had Alzheimer’s.
The nurse had thought to close Jodi’s eyes before pulling open the curtain.
We often mistake sex for the modest act of wanting to sleep with someone.
I couldn’t understand why Jodi lay there alone let alone dead.
I never knew Neil’s mother though I slept in her bed for six months.
It’s funny how I visited Jodi dead in the hospital but did not attend her wake.
A woman once led me to her bedroom, patting the bed like a collie.
Jodi’s death face was ash grey & I didn’t know how to kiss it.
My mother’s bed had floral sheets with large roses wrapped around four corners.
I felt embarrassed for Jodi for being dead so fast and young.
The first bed of a lover opens a wound impossible to heal.
My mother suffered hardship, but she’d had a bed of roses.
Pari invited me to stay, gesturing to the nanny’s bed in the corner of the apartment.
Half the women of the world are in bed right now, theirs or someone else’s.
Did Neil’s mother know where her bed was? Or whether she had bought the sheets?
Pari would lie beside me in the narrow nanny bed before the children awakened.
It’s odd to see bedroom pictures of an ex-lover on Zillow.
“Jodi, I’m so sorry, I have to go now,” I managed to say, which is pathetic.
My mother’s last bed was in a room the size of a walk-in closet.
Outside Pari’s apartment the frozen Hudson groaned. A truck towed my car.
Pari was a lawyer, I asked if she could get my car back? But we never got out of bed.
I thought of Jodi dead in her borrowed bed.
Beds are responsible for some irreparable messes, like the bed of Hamlet’s mother.
My mother died in her bed. When I was sure she was gone, I dragged her bed to the window.
1
How lovely
The round pale depth below.
Moonlight, tender and still
paints the rivers silver.
2
Ballooning God inflate each cry
of human sorrow and child’s tear;
past dirty clouds with murderous hands
each grief each sigh a puff of prayer
till safe in bed your children lie.
It began with a dream of a poem that featured Nate Nincompoop, docent to squirrels and wedding register girls, caulking the screens of his back porch memories. Nate fell off his horse on the road to Damascus and chanted songs of lucky licorice and pineapple twists while chains of mice ate golden food. Is it better to lean on a friendly portico, Nate mused, or cool the spinal column against the indifferent balustrade and watch the sun sink into gardens and distant villas? Whether you wind up in Broken Chain, Oklahoma, or Hard Cash, Mississippi, it’s best to keep your shit simple, because the further north you go, the more things eat your horse. Nate flashed a shit-eating grin, exposing gums that matched his suspenders and a dozen crowded yellow tusks. He sighed and looked up the road. No matter how you looked at it, he thought, the highway’s full of God’s worst mistakes.
Gary Percesepe is the author of eleven books, including Moratorium: Collected Stories, named by Kirkus Review one of the top 100 Indie books of 2022. He is a former editor at Antioch Review and Mississippi Review, and taught philosophy for many years at Fordham University in the Bronx. Excerpts from his memoir-in-progress have been published recently in The Sun, Sunday Salon, and Solstice. Percesepe’s work has appeared in Brevity, The Galway Review, Greensboro Review, Story Quarterly, N + 1, Salon, Wigleaf, PANK, New Ohio Review, Westchester Review, Maine Review, Short Story America, The Millions, Antioch Review, and other places. He lives in Hawai’i on the island of Maui with his family.
