a poem by Bill Berkson, a wonderful poet and artist who died yesterday at 76
All You Want
The alarm of a lighter morning breathes before your eyes in pools of smoke that smell ridiculously like someone's raised eyebrow in a cyclone. It is complete to be dying, slightly, today, and to want as if the leaf of your thoughts were pointing upwards at a field of hay in which a savage has stuck some awful message: "The soap is in your eyes, the fever's at your feet, where you sit is a honeycomb on which you're stuck, and it's safe to avoid the pleasure of the threshold." Sunday is like any other day of wires stretched across your torso like a tie of red and gold on which a clock has set its chimes. It's dull to always weave a serpent from the air, and all the levees have sunk beneath your boat that goes and never falters like the clock striking two (the bars have opened, the churches have closed), and everything will have a gleaming ring of stones around it as the windows remain full of palms. To "open": a precarious waking, the wrists turned upwards. And you know that sentimentality is a razor you walk on as a bird finds its boring nest. Sparks are strewn about the sidewalk, August is a matchbook, and your hearts flit with violence for striking in the surf of what you hope is activity with your chest bared to the closing room of what you are and all you want. -Bill Berkson
