Poem a Day: New and classic poems provided by the Academy of American Poets
Room Tone
Bill Berkson
Wrestling that old beauty
“Body and Soul”
To the ground
The genus award for epochal comes besotted
Complicity follows like caramel on a sponge mop
Child-bearing babies on stilts
I dreamed you were felled by an unspecified illness
In yours I was rowing a leaky boat, even though
The motor was foolproof and bore hairs
Taken up with travel and foreign visitors
An intimacy implied in big block letters leans
Beside its planar incandescent surrogate
I tend backward haughtily through froth
Abandoned sweetness meaning torpor
Behind gorgeous intervals of removal and need
An alligator in every pot
Keeping company doesn’t count
Dame Kind adjusts her ribbon frills
Give life a shot
Circular breath redemption
At the Door of the Wolf
You heard me
About the poem : “‘Room Tone’ is the last of a set of quite recent, quite thorny poems included at the end of my book ‘Expect Delays,’ due out from Coffee House Press this fall. I like the fact that in filmmaking and television production, room tone (another term for this is ‘presence’) is the ‘silence’ recorded at a location or space when no dialogue is spoken. I’m also aware of the fact that ending a book with a poem of which the last line is ‘You heard me’ may, at best, send the imaginary reader back to ‘square one,’ which is to say, the beginning of the book.”
-Bill Berkson
About Bill Berkson
Bill Berkson is the author of “Expect Delays” (Coffee House Press, 2014). He is professor emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute and lives in New York and San Francisco.
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day@poets.org.
(c) 2014 Bill Berkson.
Distributed by King Features Syndicate
