Watching the Complex Train-Track Changes

By Bernadette Mayer b. 1945 Bernadette Mayer

To Men

You put on an ornate ballgown

You say “someone has to do it”

You take me to where you work,

The inside of a pyramid with chasms,

Watching the complex train-track changes

Products and objects make love to my father

Two babies are born—Bruno and Daisy

You take your shirt off looking boylike & lovely

You get on the plane, both clown & wizard

And then get off in a comedy of manners

Our dates become a comedy of dinners

Your name rhymes with clothes

Your plane folds & flies away

Without us, I’ll make the next one

We are enclosed in spaceless epics by breathless bricks

& still we’ll meet like runes or the leashes for hawks

Let’s go! Can we stay? Go to sleep.

A tree wouldn’t talk or weep if I-forget-what

And you in the train’s opulent rooms

Switch your cock to a baby and then say

“Must there (not) be a law against this?”

You add, “I have been thinking of you in my head”

You wear green glitter on your shirt instead of

A tie, that’s how I recognize you as you

You are the prep cook the sous-chef you make

Duplicating potato salad like the loaves & fishes

You create gorgeous paper-like sculptures of foods

We go down in the car through threatening snows

To arrive in a second to eat in a renovated place

You and I tell “what” we are at the end of a movie

Our podium of soft loud feet flies by accident

I take the train to your house to hear Shakespeare & Verdi

Everyone applauds when you walk in. The director

Holds up each actor & describes his physical being

I talk to your father but only by telephone

You have the royal blue 8 � x 11 notebook with the lock on it

I want one but you say you cant get them anymore

I walk twice through that city I’ve been in before

All through its rooms, its streets and its Commons

"Watching the Complex Train-Track Changes" by Bernadette Mayer, from A Bernadette Mayer Reader. Copyright © 1968 by Bernadette Mayer. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

Source: A Bernadette Mayer Reader (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1992)

Biography

An avant-garde writer associated with the New York School of poets, Bernadette Mayer was born in Brooklyn, New York, and has spent most of her life in New York City. Her collections of poetry include Midwinter Day (1982, 1999), A Bernadette Mayer Reader (1992), The Desire of Mothers to Please Others in Letters (1994), Another Smashed Pinecone (1998), and Poetry State Forest (2008). Known for her innovative use of language, . . .

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