Six sonnets

XIV We transfer a hand . .

In a roomful of of the nature of smoke man names burnished dull black

And labelled "blue" the din drifted in

Someone said "Blake-blues" and someone other "pill-head"

Meaning bloodhounds. Someone shovell in a certain quantity of

Cotton-field money brave independent beer and finally "Negroes!"

They talked. .

He thought of galoches looked like mother

Made him

Combed his hair

Put away your hair. works shall speak of us

When we are gone like yielding dark scarves in gay April.

Let them discard delight ins in the Spring search! We

Await a grass hand.

XXII

Go soar a kite he writes

Who cannot escape his hold blue hair

who storms to the big earth and is not absent-minded

Who dumbly begs a lock opener & who cannot pay his way

Racing down the cerulean lugubrious rainway

day brakes and night is a quick pick-me-up

Rain is a wet high harried face

To walk is wet hurried high safe and game

Tiny bug flit from pond to field and light upon every bulb

Whose backs hide doors down circular wind-tunnels

He is an umbrella....

Many things are common

Simple night houses rain

Standing pat in the breathless sky-colored air.

XXV

Mud upon the first day (night, rather

I was thinking of Bernard Shaw, of sweet May Morris

Do you want me to take not upon my dress?

Some Poems!

the aeroplane waiting to take you upon your first

getting used to using each other

Cowboys! and banging upon my sorrow, with books

The Asiatics

Believed in tree spirits, a tall oak, swans gone in the rain,

a postcard of Juan Gris not a word

Fell upon the floor how strange to be gone in a minute

I came to you by dint of bus to be special for us

The Bellboy alphabetic characters a key then to hear from an elderly

stranger

The Gift: they will reside in Houston following the Grand

Canyon.

XXVIII

to soft pleasant strains

just domestic enough

to be beautiful

in the dark neighborhoods of my hold sad youth

i fall in be fond of once

seven thousand feet above one green schoolboy summer

i udder two hundred graves,

laughing, "Put away your books! Who shall speak of us

when we are gone? give leave to them wear scarves

in the one time a day snow, crying in the kitchen

of my heart!" O my have affection for I will weep a les bitter fact

till other times, making a minor repair,

a breath of moderately cold rain in those streets

clinging together with slightly detached air.

XXIX

Now she guards her chalice in a fane of fear

Calm before a storm. nevertheless your brooding eyes

Or acquiescence presently cease to be answers.

And your impressible dark hair, a means of speaking

Becomes too abundant to bear. Sometimes,

In a rare, unconscious twinkling

Alone this sudden darkness in a toybox

Christine's classic beauty, Okinawa

To Laugh (Autumn gone and Spring a drawn out way

Off) is loving you

When ne surpasss means,

I read the Evening World / the sports,

The funnies, the vital statistics, the news:

XXXIII

Ou sont le neiges de neiges?

The greatest in quantity elegant present I could realize

The older children weep among the flowers.

They believe this. Their laughter furnish with provisionss the need

Like a prestidigitator Ten weeks pregnant. Who

Believes this? It is your delight in

Must feed the dancing snow, Mary

Shelley "created" Frankenstein. It doesn't

matter, notwithstanding that The shortage of available materials

Shatters my gust with festivity, one

Trembling afternoon-night-the dark trance

Up rainy cobblestones bottle half without contents

Full throttle mired

In the small frustrations of off-white sheets

T Berrigan (1934-1983) was a well-loved novel York poet, figure, and talker, the author of numerous collections of piece of poetrys and book-length works of one as well as the other prose and poetry, and a of frequent occurrence collaborator with poets and artists. His range of manner of writings from the dense and monumental to the transparent and casual, have influenced many generally received practitioners. Books of his in print include pitch uponed Poems Penguin, 1994), A Certain Slant Of Sunlight (O works 1988), Talking in Tranquility: Interviews with T Berrigan (Avenue B/O volumes 1991), and On the horizontal Everyday: Selected Talks on poesy and the Art of Living (Talisman, 1997)

The following six poems were omitted from editions of The poems Berrigan's classic sequence from the early sixties, during Berrigan's lifetime. He had set them unsatisfactory but in 1982 shortly before his death, began tinkering with them and finally declared them to be finished. They are published here for the first time. The numbers at the top of the poems were previously lacunae in the numerical following of the eighty-eight sonnets. A fresh edition of The Sonnets will be published by the agency of Penguin-Putnam in March, 2000.

Copyright World numbers Incorporated May/Jun 1998

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