Charles Bernstein / Two Poems

Two Poems  by Charles Bernstein

CONJUNCTIONS:50, Spring 2008 LONELINESS IN LINDEN                —After Wallace Stevens The fear and the hum are one. Monuments of show gumming the works Until the weather grows tired of the people And the people grow tired of the dance. Jamais, jamais, jamais, again. The measure of the town against a dampening sky Cobbling together six million tunes Into more than the tones tattoo Or their scrambled mosaic forecloses. And if the fume and the hope Are one? My monkey, from ’49 Steps as silent as those songs Along the cratered dark Where Jews do Jewish things No one pretends to understand Or are they pilgrims on this night When the fear and the hum are one? WON’T YOU GIVE UP THIS POEM TO SOMEONE WHO NEEDS IT? Remember what I told you about purgatory? Limbo? How all that’s happening now is just this waiting around till the big cheese makes up her mind about you? She makes you the way you are and then decides if it panned out; for every ten half-baked cookies there’s a gem &, you know, just maybe you’re one of those. Then there’s those take her name in vain— whaddya call them?, the religious moralists; she don’t much cotton to them, not when they try to take away a woman’s right to choose or bad-mouth folks almost as queer as she is. Well, everyone makes mistakes. That’s what purgatory’s for. Sometimes it happens that while you wait you see what’s what—start accepting you’re in a long queue for God only knows what. And neither of you has any idea what the hell the matter is or what to do about it.