Room Tone by Bill Berkson

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend September 4, 2014   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            Copyright © 2014 by Bill Berkson. Used with permission of the author. About This 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 in 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   Bill Berkson is the author of Expect Delays (Coffee House Press, 2014). He is a professor emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute and splits his time between San Francisco and New York. Most Recent Book by Berkson   Expect Delays (Coffee House Press, 2014) "Archaic Torso of Apollo" by Rainer Maria Rilke "Exact" by Rae Armantrout "Refresh. Refresh. Refresh." by Noah Eli Gordon Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038