When I was an undergraduate in 2006, songwriter and poet David Berman visited my university to read to a standing-room-only crowd in an ornate campus auditorium. He seemed immensely uncomfortable onstage, his hand trembling as he laid on the podium the wrinkled sheets of paper from which he would read. Afterward, when I asked him to sign my tattered copy of his poetry collection, Actual Air, which I’d been enamored with since high school, he wrote, “Derek, God bless you,” in a shaky hand.
Though I could see he was in rough shape, I didn’t know that he’d attempted suicide just three years earlier. And I couldn’t have known that he would eventually succeed in 2019, leaving behind seven albums and that one marvelous collection of poems, a body of work that rewards no matter how many times I revisit it.
Around the time of that university reading, Berman wrote two of my favorite lyrics, by him or anyone else: “There is a place past the blues I never want to see again” and “I saw God’s shadow on this world.” Though the poems that follow are quiet and domestic—full of what author Justin Taylor has described as “surreal clarity”—it’s Berman’s hard-won familiarity with the difficult and the divine that has drawn me back to his work again and again, for decades.
—Derek Askey, Senior editor
The Charm of 5:30
It’s too nice a day to read a novel set in England. We’re within inches of the perfect distance from the sun the sky is blueberries and cream, and the wind is as warm as air from a tire. Even the headstones in the graveyard seem to stand up and say “Hello! My name is . . .” It’s enough to be sitting here on my porch, thinking about Kermit Roosevelt, following the course of an ant, or walking out into the yard with a cordless phone to find out she is going to be there tonight On a day like today, what looks like bad news in the distance turns out to be something on my contact, carports and white courtesy phones are spontaneously reappreciated and random “okay”s ring through the backyards This morning I discovered the red tints in cola when I held a glass of it up to the light and found an expensive flashlight in the pocket of a winter coat I was packing away for summer It all reminds me of that moment when you take off your sunglasses after a long drive and realize it’s earlier and lighter out than you had accounted for. You know what I’m talking about, and that’s the kind of fellowship that’s taking place in town, out in the public spaces. You won’t overhear anyone using the words “dramaturgy” or “state inspection” today. We’re too busy getting along. It occurs to me that the laws are in the regions and the regions are in the laws, and it feels good to say this, something that I’m almost sure is true, outside under the sun. Then to say it again, around friends, in the resonant voice of a nineteenth-century senator, just for a lark. There’s a shy looking fellow on the courthouse steps, holding up a placard that says “But I kinda liked Reagan.” His head turns slowly as a beautiful girl walks by, holding a refrigerated bottle up against her flushed cheek. She smiles at me and I allow myself to imagine her walking into town to buy lotion at a brick pharmacy. When she gets home she’ll apply it with great lingering care before moving into her parlor to play 78 records and drink gin-and-tonics beside her homemade altar to James Madison. In a town of this size, it’s certainly possible that I’ll be invited over one night. In fact I’ll bet you something. Somewhere in the future I am remembering today. I’ll bet you I’m remembering how I walked into the park at five thirty, my favorite time of day, and found two cold pitchers of just poured beer, sitting there on the bench. I am remembering how my friend Chip showed up with a catcher’s mask hanging from his belt and how I said great to see you, sit down, have a beer, how are you, and how he turned to me with the sunset reflecting off his contacts and said, wonderful, how are you.
The Double Bell of Heat
Midway down Walnut Street a yellow sign says Slow Deaf Child, with the silhouette of a running boy painted over the bent and dented surface. Just the post, rusted to black, gives the story away. The child must have grown up and left the neighborhood a long time ago. And now there’s this sign. You can imagine his parents going to the city clerk’s office. The paperwork is strange and complex, languishing in office out-bins, drifting through council meetings. One spring morning the boy sees two city workers get out of a truck and set the bright sign in the patch of grass between the sidewalk and street. He watches it out the window, knowing what it is, watching it gather the world around it like a mountain in the Bible. Cars heed the sign, many drivers scanning to the left and right hoping to catch sight of the deaf boy playing. Some drivers imagine hitting him and slow down even more. They play out the scene, what they would say, how their lives would change. And the years pass, even for the little deaf boy. He gets married, has kids. Maybe moves to a village in New England with stone walls and candle makers. You can imagine him returning to the old neighborhood. Driving down on a fall afternoon into the quiet center of things, gently braking before this old streetsign. He would do that, he would come back. As if it had been written twice.
“The Charm of 5:30” and “The Double Bell of Heat,” by David Berman, were originally printed in Actual Air by Open City Books and reprinted by permission of Drag City and the estate of David Berman. Copyright © 1999 by David Berman.
