Briggs Room Reading

Stanford University Spring 1984

Hi there, everybody.

This August I was sitting outside the Student Union reading To the Lighthouse and

thinking about when my mother would attain the literary buoyancy of Mrs. Ramsey.

It was a spacey day, and out of the store comes this little kid

with a woman I presumed to be his Ma. The woman had three chocolate bars

and she gave the child one half of one. The Union bees were waiting for him to open it.

They had already crawled into my coke can, too intent on sucking sugar up

to sting me when I waved at them. The woman gives the child her chocolate bar

and she walks away, and I might have seen her start eating, but reading all day

made me too tired to turn my neck, so I just heard her unwrapping.

Then the child said the first two lines of my poem. I was blown away by the beauty of his words

and how they represented in haiku implicitness the perfect tasty union

of mother and child. Then the child said the third line of my poem and

that changed everything. Because the word that is my poem’s second line was misspoken.

The child was about four. And he meant to say something else, that, in order to say,

he had to add a couple of cloggy syllables. What before had been sweet now signified

a kind of craving I knew more closely, and I guessed that the woman was probably a sitter,

not a Ma.

The last three lines are mine.

“Sweetness Alighting”

“Me and my Ma

are chocolate.

Choclaholics.”

Always

a ways

away.

This next poem was conceived while working the graveyard shift

at a Mighty Taco on the east side of Buffalo. The key situation of this place:

Everyone I had successfully avoided on the streets for the four years prior

all came in to buy food after drinking. The poem is about Deb,

the junior assistant manager.

“Deb Says She Will Lose Weight Soon”

Your thighs are capsized canoes.

But this is bliss.

My maya and your maya.

You lean over my lap.

The handiwipe is in the sink.

And your breasts are encyclopedias.

They are heavy.

They are stiff.

Never been used.

World Books.

We scrape the red right off our faces.

This is a sonatina about someone not here.

“Sonatina”

Becky long and red

fingers

priapic

she dances back-

ward watch-

ing you

come.

II.

I would be offended if

if a woman

if she said

“Yes I will

I will swallow it

your –

but only if I can mix it

with

with Wyler’s grape Kool-

Aid

Mix.”

I would.

III.

Coffee break, yes, a

Fuck break,

right, right,

yes.

The first book of poetry I purchased was Wordsworth’s collected poems,

near Edmonton, Alberta. I was working on famous Al Oeming’s Game Farm

literally dawn to dusk, shoveling shit into the pick-up.

I memorized the first sections of the Immortality Ode

while trying to spot the buffalo who had the runs. Because once you saw

the runs you had to report it and then watch for it to happen again

so you could shoot a dart into the animal and give it medicine.

This was the only part of the job I liked.

“Under Wordsworth”

“There was a time

when meadow, grove,

and stream” –

filled my genderless eyes

with steam

and with blood.

I kicked mud

but being spry

didn’t eat

mud.

Vapor sleeves lid up

the waterfall’s drawers

like football player

hobgoblins.

I plopped in

the hole the splashing gored

and stayed there

perky

until I heard my friends

coming, throwing

twigs at the hanging

pine cones.

This is a poem about a wimp from my childhood, Mickey Higgins, who was large but weak, who nonetheless had a large and strong dog, named Arhumba. Arhumba bit the ear off Dirky, my best friend’s dog. This poem is not about that particular incident.

“Remorse Years Later”

Those boxing gloves

Given to Mickey Higgins

Made him even easier

To beat up.

I wrote this poem the morning my first day working at Xerox,

a morning that marked the beginning of me getting back on the stick,

said my Ma, who was driving the car. I was looking out the windows

and recalled that scene in “Taxi Driver” where Travis drops an alka seltzer

into the glass and, a Zen trainee, absorbs himself into its patternless plop and fizz.

“Rural Red Light”

He goes through it.

We sink.

without

bubbles.

Our samsara waits on Fairport

‘s nirvana.

A spent strawberry field

and mushy yellow cambium

crave another galaxy’s

smoother

religion.

Robert Creeley and Lou Reed seemed to take on a greater significance for me

after I left Buffalo and moved to Palo Alto and lived in an apartment complex called

“Tan Village.” California! Only when I returned to Buffalo did I discover that the place

was owned by a man actually named Mr. Tan.

“Proof”

Proud words like lurid

need lines longer than

Creeley’s breathed-in ones

lines drunk with nouns

aims for our irises

shingleboards

denting our nuts

or any kind of play

biting the hair

of the night

or noon

and after -- .

Live with

out bur-

glary of

mind

lone

II.

“Lou Reed is Saved in Newark”

(after Lester Bangs)

“WANTED

LOU REED

DEAD OR ALIVE

(what’s the difference)

for transforming a whole generation

of young Americans into faggot junkies.”

Is there any word

I can use

and how much

does it

cost

to leave

here?

sweet nuthin’

sweet Jane –

unroll,

rock your hearts.

This is pretty much the first poem I wrote. I wrote it in Nevada, 1979:

East of Reno, on the banks of Interstate 80. I stood in one place for 25 hours

with a sign that said “HOME.” Normally this was a fabulously successful sign.

Three cars emitted “Ohhhhs” that were split by the Dopler Effect

as they locked their doors. Although I was hitching alone, I imagined myself

with my brother, Christopher. When I rolled his boyscout sleeping bag out

I started having desert hallucinations. I overheard four people

arguing at a table that had a red and white checkerboarded cloth on top of it.

Then I heard the A side of Tom Petty’s “You’re Gonna Get It” album

and understood and remembered all the words for the first time.

Me and my brother started to dance.

“Two Days in One Place”

The Reno truckstop is behind us

and Christopher’s halo and frantic rap

have unraveled and scattered

into entropic bits of benzedrine psychosis.

Morning is still early rinsed orange

but my sneaker treads are melting.

Mindlessly I roll

my dewy down bag just right.

My brother sucks breath from this skinny roach

and sends melancholy streams of smoke

skidding across seed-heavy heads

of ochre desert weeds.

I console my brother.

“Two more of these black ones,

will wring what’s left

from your dopamine glands.

“So be happy.

And take my place by the roadside

and thumb till noon.

Dance where the roads merge.

“I am just one yawning fucker.

Tonight, brother, we are going to brush our teeth in Cheyenne.”