The Obvious Tradition

By Bill Berkson b. 1939 Bill Berkson

I haven’t remembered anything, only the names

and that their dates have been replaced by fees

toted up out of mischief:

a whopping yellow sun, finesse swallowed hard,

a scrapbook in pantyhose dawdling beside some Shreveport-like expanse.

But now you see it, she’s supposed to call.

Surely neither will converse, they merely tell,

succumbing to a disorderly shelf life like Tampax in June.

Salute the budding terminus where the East Side was.

Can there be a way to redefine the tense behind its jaunts,

the pubescent imagery a hand calls forth

as, rippling, it is thrust into the brine?

The phantom tugboat slips along

in depths past Garbo’s awnings and the united glaze

which wilts, harnessing dim signatories in the windows’ sarong.

Do things go further in need as I could? Or are they immune?

How else have I been taught to guess

and then been told to know, because matter equals good?

A silken light masks the entrance to the market proofs of time.

Source: Portrait and Dream: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2009)

Biography

Born in New York in 1939, Bill Berkson is a poet, critic, teacher and sometime curator, who has been active in the art and literary worlds since his early twenties. He is professor emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute, where, between 1984 and 2008, he taught art history, art writing and poetry; Berkson also served as interim dean in 1992 and directed the Letters and Science and public lectures programs. He studied at . . .

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