David Berman

David Berman was born in 1967 in Williamsburg, Virginia. He graduated from the Greenhill School in Addison, Texas, the University of Virginia, and the University of Massachusetts MFA Program. His band, the Silver Jews, has released five albums from Drag City Records: The Natural Bridge, Starlite Walker, American Water, Bright Flight, and Tanglewood Numbers. Berman’s poems have appeared in such journals as The Baffler, The Believer, Fence, and Open City. His first book is Actual Air (Open City Books, 1999). Berman resides in Nashville, Tennessee.

Democratic Vistas

The narrator was shot by the sniper he was describing

and I quickly picked up his pen.

What luck, I thought, to be sitting up here in the narrator’s

tower where the parking lots look like chalkboards and the characters

scurry around or fall down and die as I design it.

Then I started to read the novel I’d inherited, and didn’t like

what I discovered.

Most of the characters were relentlessly evil, taken right off the bad

streets of the Bible.

The narrator would interrupt the story at all the wrong times, like a

third wheel on a date, and deliver shaky opinions like “People who

wear turtlenecks must have really fucked-up necks.”

He would get lost in pointless investigations, i.e., was Pac-Man an

animal, so that when we returned to the characters many pages

later, their hair had grown past the shoulder and their fingernails

were inches long.

In support of the novel, I must say it was designed well. The scenes

were like rowhouses. They had common sidewalls, through which one

could hear the faint voices and footsteps of what was to come.

I’ve lived those long driving scenes. Everyone knows how hard it is,

after you’ve been on the road all day, to stop driving. You go to sleep

and the road runs under the bed like a filmstrip.

I also liked the sheriff’s anxious dream sequence, where he keeps

putting a two-inch-high man in jail, and the tiny man keeps walking

out, in between the bars.

After a sleepless night he’s awoken by the phone. There’s a sniper in

the University tower. The sheriff stands before the bathroom mirror.

Drops of Visine are careening down his face.

They are cold and clear

and I can count them through my rifle scope.

April 13, 1865

At first the sound had no meaning.

The shot came from the balcony,

as if the play had sprung an annex,

and I, John Sleeper Clarke,

pictured stars through oak scaffolds

as the news traveled over

the chairscape like a stain.

In that dark room lit by gas jets

the Welshman to my left conceded

the armrest we’d been fighting over

and doctors and half doctors

flowed into the scarlet aisles

to help.

I did not take to the image

of a bay mare waiting in the alley

or a manhunt through Maryland.

I remember standing up,

as the others did,

and how the assassin was in midair

when the stagehands wheeled out clouds.

Community College in the Rain

Announcement: All pupils named Doug.

Please come to the lounge on Concourse K.

Please join us for coffee and remarks.

Dougs: We cannot come. We are injured by golf cleats.

Announcement: Today we will discuss the energy in a wing

and something about first basemen.

Ribs will be served in the cafeteria.

Pep Club: We will rally against golf cleats today.

The rally will be held behind the gymnasium.

There is a Model T in the parking lot with its lights on.

Dougs: We are dying in the nurse’s office.

When she passes before the window, she looks like a bride.

Karen (whispers): We are ranking the great shipwrecks.

Announcement: In the classroom filled with dishwater light,

Share your thoughts on public sculpture.

All: O Dougs, where are you?

Dougs: In the wild hotels of the sea.

From His Bed in the Capital City

The Highway Commissioner dreams of us.

We are driving by Christmas tree farms

wearing wedding rings with on/off switches,

composing essays on leg room in our heads.

We know there is policy like ice sculpture,

policy that invisibly dictates the shape

of the freeway forests and the design

of the tollbooths that passing children

send their minds into.

Photography’s remainder is sound and momentum,

which we were looking to pare off the edges

of the past anyway, so snapshots of Mom

with a kitchen table hill of cocaine

or the dog frozen in the attitude

of eating raw hamburger

get filed under “Misc. Americana,”

though only partially contained there,

as beads of sap we are always leaking

from the columns of the bar graph.

The voices of the bumperstickers tangle in our heads

like cafeteria noise and we can’t help but be aware

that by making this trip, by driving home for Christmas,

we are assuming some classic role.

It is the role he casts us in: “holiday travelers.”

He dreams us safely into our driveways

and leaves us at the flickering doors.