...some kind of observer, in the world,
waving my books like flags –
afraid or fascinated by everything
that might or might not
                                              happen next.

...hiding away my long list of heroes
on unconnected pages in case there’s a purge
waiting
                just behind the horizon.
Then pulling out names like change –
to make up the difference
between my pretense and my trivia.

...I want to be read like translations,
a little original fame – on anyone’s’ lips.
Rushing the years, for fear:
        the table;
        the half-empty drink;
        nothing to put down on paper.


r berk
Denver June 1996

Tracks

I breathe in a chest full of concrete corridors.
A stomach with tunnels links myth to mind.
And the muffled Cyrillic sighs of simple thugs
are on a plane to Istanbul.
Green light seeps through the bars.
Private subways rumbling,
the white guard hides in the snow,
sleigh bells pass at midnight like wolves
at our windows while I lay stretched out
across the Sahara, naked, too bare
to hide bombs.

Remember the tracks over the ice,
the sentences like camel trains
reaching into the night.
Remember the tracks across the Neiva,
rusted revolutions, a poet’s
imaginary war.

Curriculum Vitae
        And what does it hear?
        Wiskawa Szymborska

What is required?
Unattached crumpled pages
gathering dust beneath my desk.

The address is:
a rock where I sat by the creek;
a chair and coffee-stained table;
a parking lot outside of town.
Mountains, deserts, oceans and an endless stream of cities
dated to here by
a summer I remember
or sometime after our 1st or 2nd meeting.

I married the madness from other voices,
but love comes only
in occasional bursts.
And the children I’ve imagined
are still unborn,
restless...and kicking on the pages I have left.

I’ve understood and forgotten.
I’ve paused at the edge and jumped.
I’ve slept and lost track of the stars.
I’ve lied and stared back at the sun.

My references could come from anyone.
And I know them all when we meet.

There is a snapshot included
(though you may hardly see my face).
Beneath the rumble of machines,
is this factory of words.

r berk
Moab, 1996

KTNN on Rte. 160

The architecture of heroes and clouds,
stories on leashes – believe,
all the concrete and glass. The words
are carried away, in grains,
one piece of sedimentary history
at a time. One ghostly piece of adobe wall.
This is a hero-less story.
Hogan architects, building empty homes,
wind storms raging, approaching
in dust, in red gray waves
under my city, under my tunnels through
myth. The storm is underground, screaming
through the clay. The dead must be
tied down, held in their graves.

The inhabitants left. Left burnt out trailers,
concrete foundations and broken glass,
from desolation to desolation.
Snow in the footprints of their heroes.
We imagine we are wrong.
Carnival of storms, not heroes.
Builders gathering white bones in the sand. Cages
keep the emptiness inside.
Keep the emptiness inside like
a promise. Reconstructing
the thin cold dream,
cracks open mouths spitting stone,
sending walls back to forgotten.
But we remember the architects in
their crumbling shadows. Red
dust moving through the pile of years,
still creating the geometry of broken
lives, breathing dust in slow revolutions.
Saliva drops from lips to stone.

r berk
October, 97 NYC