UNDER THE IMPRESSION

JAMES BERGER

BLAZEVOX[BOOKS]
Buffalo, New York
Under the Impression
by James Berger
Copyright © 2020

Published by BlazeVOX [books]

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without

the publisher’s written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews.

Printed in the United States of America

Interior design and typesetting by Geoffrey Gatza

Cover art: "Blue Storm" by Jessica Nissen. Photo by Jane Huntington.
Interior art: Kaphar images: Images from Titus Kaphar's "The Vesper Project" (pages 77 and 86)
are by Omar Hamati, courtesy of Titus Kaphar and Reginald Dwayne Betts.

First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-60964-360-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019955352

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 Under the Impression

The physiology of the care-historians–

Under pressure, their dents find outlets
in cantations, they find impasses
under their mothers’ canopies
that hold up atmospheres and promise health

The daughters’ pictures are pregnant

with gravities, pulling under
and a frictionless sliding of tones
to utter a song called “Impervious”
that must be sung con molto speranza

We will bear our gravel under a heaven of fact

The fact of breath

Under the power of bared structures without impression

that now ascend with us hanging in hammocks below them
under the shade tree whose signal is pleasure and fruition
under the guise of the discarded mask and the true face
and the deepening every day of dialogue
for many days of life

The fact of eating

Under the authority of nourishment, of sharing

the rituals we perform and plunge their sacred
binding of heat into the coolness and liquid comfort
of love and human company
under control the stupidity, fury, and murder whose impression
is finitude lacking sympathy

The fact of porousness

under contract under the pile of newspapers

under the ancillary omnipotent of circumstances,
under the chains of consequence,

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sequential, under
the imprint of corridors, narrow, impressing

Impressed

The future, if it comes, must be solid, like a kernel

Under the pressure of the impasse

Under supporting structures

Chubby babies are lifting the clouds

They will puncture the ceiling with the painted sky

Look up!

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 Time is Passing and I’m not in the Groove

There is the aging

of the universe and
there is the universal

aging.
There is the time it takes
to decide

to move and the delay

between then
and the beat.

I’m bad... imprecise in the “&,”

never finding the “1";
someone tells me every two bars

the cymbal will hit it,

so listen:
find the latch, get the key,

be in the pocket.
But I can’t hear the time--
I think oracular, play static.

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 Place the Columns in Their Places

Place the columns in their places, these columns

of imagined marble put together at seams
as I saw them on the Parthenon, never a single cylinder

but sectioned, fitted. Imagine them standing,

from base to fluting, awaiting
the placement of the roof-supporting beams

and the friezes and cornices that reach around the structure
and tell some evidently important, probably sacred,
but not fully comprehensible story of humans, animals, and deities,

of rituals, sacrifices, combat in war, judgements in peace,

childbirth, dying, the regulation of farm land and commerce,
scenes from a school room, the long day of a medical practitioner

during a plague, the conquest of a neighboring polity, the slaughter

of men, enslavement of women, the burning of its temples,
the giving of the sacred books of Law to the great Legislator,

the failure of crops, the explosion of the mountain,

the long sea voyage to somewhere else– perhaps to here;
perhaps the narrative was of some other, prior place,

now in ruins, or now conquered, inhabited, occupied

by a happier, stronger people.

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a foyer sonaric toots
membrane contiguous to ooze
no mephistopheles necessary to sell
what’s in question light as a bell
I’m in the door, now shut,
table’s in the wall on its gut
pressure simmers lenience elides
and in the space erodes
the normative behaviors
smiling
in sneezes corrugated happy
we’ve lost our tangibility
in the furniture’s sensuous imbecility.

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&&&&&&&&
 I Fell for the Bread Nurse

I fell for the Bread Nurse,

inert, motionless;
I felt I could not rise
until she kneaded me.
Along the shelves she walked,
healing and nourishing.
I disassemble
my rigid theater
and the tics
that colonize
my extremities.
When the Bread Nurse smiles,
no architecture
of ligaments can hold
its cantilever.

I fell for
the Bread Nurse

I fell
in pixilated wounds

I fell
in round excessive fermenting

The room is yeasted

The Bread Nurse formed me

then she baked me.

I rise in joy

through the oven’s orthodoxy.

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 It Takes All Kinds, But It Doesn't Take Much...

Well it takes all kinds, does it not? Indeed, it takes all kinds.
There is no kind of a kind that it doesn’t take. It takes it.
It takes them. Not the entirety of the kind, but at the least
one of a kind; of each kind. Because, as has been mentioned,
it takes all kinds. With that in mind, would you be so kind
as to respond in kind. And yet, what is meant, precisely,
by this rind, for clearly we are not made privy to what has
been innerly designed. We see what might unwind
from somewhere behind, or around, or somewhere
in the general vicinity, but if in fact it takes, as we assert,
all kinds, on what grounds do we determine if a given specimen
is of a kind, is one of that kind (which is not to say or to imply
the one of that kind), or is merely the kin
of the kind, or a copy of the kind, a projection of the mind
of another kind. Or, conversely, more generously, should we say
that “kind” is what appears as kind; that kind is kin
or kind is rind, or kind is what you find, around
or behind. Or, what you lose in exactitude,
you gain in kindness? So, if kindness would unwind,
would it be lessened, flattened, diminished in thickness?
What would then be distinguishable? If there were to be
generalized kindness, how could we tell one kind from another?
Are you our sister, our brother? Or, as the baby bird
asked the backhoe, Are you my mother?
But why not? There is precedent, it appears, for all
kinship. If someone dances, who is to say
they don’t dance well? What kind of dance?
To strain for rhyme, let’s call it “ecumenical.”
So, that’s the kind it takes?
That buzzing puts me to sleep, but I can’t sleep.
I’m in Plentitude! But one kind pokes
while the other prods.

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Moves like silent trucks;
an estranged circle
neither enclosing nor excluding.
The outside doesn't know it's outside
(invisible indeterminate membrane)
the inside doesn't know it's inside.
On each side the play
of passionate fluids
marries portions of air
seen as meridians of conjugal verbs,
and the imminence of crystal
which is the barrier,
the flaming angel
against intelligence

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 The Termite

A winged termite is dying

in a cup of tea.
The tea is cool in the evening.
The termite thrashes its legs
and curls its body horribly
in unspeakable agonies.
Having seen it in these terms
I feel obliged to help it out,
although I don’t think it will do much good.
This is one of those nymph termites
out for mating, and only one
out of a million survives.
Some are eaten by birds or lizards
or dogs or even people.
Others fall into cups of tea.
I poke it out of the tea with my pen
and it lies almost motionless on the ground,
twitching in slow motion.

Suddenly I remember that I haven’t yet

washed out a small cut on my finger
that I reopened in the afternoon
playing tennis--just something I did
cutting vegetables yesterday,
but I’m afraid it might get infected.
I run inside to wash it out
with whiskey, since there’s no disinfectant in the house,
and in the dark I crash into a door
I forgot I had closed
to keep out the mosquitoes.

When I get back, the termite has disappeared.

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&&&&&&&&&&&
 A Scene From My Death

At the family picnic, it’s my job to dig a moat,

nothing wide or deep, just a protective trench
around the area.

First, I have to clear the snow.

The ground is slightly frozen, but only the top couple inches,
so I set to it. It’s not onerous.

I’m a little surprised

it’s not more difficult. I enjoy pushing the shovel into the soil,
then lifting up the dirt, putting it aside.

My children are playing within the enclosure,

my wife arranges food on the picnic table.

Without really feeling anything, I fall down.

On the ground, the location of my consciousness has shifted.

My daughters run to me–

to a place that seems untenable.

My daughters run to me.

They’re hitting me, pulling at me.
“Daddy, wake up, please,
please, Daddy, please wake up!”

The ground is just slightly frozen.

The top couple inches seem surprised.

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Here we were, singled in, moosing out,
mousing in, aggressive, timid,
a path of tile, next tile, sealed by grout,
then, in a present, are, but only one per planet.
How happy the other is, how he blesses
my losses. He thought, yes, this feels right
to choke on words then give them back as kisses.
This life, this self, held tight, not without weight
but carried lightly, a smooth early flower.
All that I want now and crush my brain for,
he had then. But I was there; I saw that door,
but dived away, kicked his knees, called him a liar.
Oblique strange pain to punish
myself for living one life, letting another vanish.

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 My Father’s Questions

He was a man of questions–

big ones and small ones, smart and stupid, annoying questions,
repetitive, essential, obvious.
He always would ask me if I had friends,
did I have a social life, whom did I see and spend time with?
(And sure, I saw people, I had colleagues,
my tennis friends, my music friends,
poetry friends, politics friends;
then there were the parents-of-my-children’s-friends
friends. But did I have friends?).
Why did he always ask me that question?

And he asks me, how is my marriage?

Are we working on it? Are we in therapy?
He asks me, what am I teaching? Will I send him a syllabus?
He asks me, when I give a poetry reading, do I explain
the poems, do I give any kind of introduction or context?
Because I really ought to, they’re not very easy to understand.
Do I read the poems in The New Yorker? Mine are a lot like those,
he says, very obscure, very self-involved.
(And I say, no, my poems are not at all like the poems in The New Yorker;
those poems are boring, mine are entertaining).

He asks me, when I teach my classes, do I ever get the students

to think about what makes a work of literature great?
He asks me, why don’t I write a paper
on why literary styles change from one historical period to another?
He asks me, has anyone ever done that?
He asks me, have you ever thought of teaching a course
on why literature is important?
He asks me, do I ever think about what it means to be alive
or what life means, why are we here, what’s our purpose?
And I say, Jesus Christ, Dad, how the fuck should I know? I mean,
of course, all of the above, what the hell?!

But maybe I don’t. Maybe I ask those questions the same way I have friendships,
not in truth, only instrumentally.

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 Capable

I’m fully capable.

This is my signature.

They never explained

why I am here.

The doctor said,

it’s the thing I explained to you before

so I never get an explanation.

The bathroom is around the corner.

I know I’m not

fully capable.

I know there are complications.

My sister hasn’t called, but the phone doesn’t work.

It doesn’t seem to work.

The nurse always asks, “How are you today?”

“I’m all right,” I say “How should I be?”

You see what I’m facing.

“How are you today, Mrs. Berger?”

Yes, I’m Mrs. Berger.

Why do we every day talk about the future?

I am fully capable
of taking in what you are telling me,

but I haven’t had lunch.

I want to get out of here, in the present.

Why are you asking me this?

It’s premature.

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