This Knish

Poem for David Berman



At first, you were only the side project of a person I, um, idolized.
You had some magic by association
And healing properties -- you drew the sting away.
Graceful and happier, you walked with a swing in the album photo.
That blitheness made me happy because it had nothing to do with me.

Now I think you are the priest of people like me
Eating a knish by myself at a table for four
At Katz's Delicatessen on Houston.
This knish does not have healing properties, though
with its soft innards and warm shoe-leather crust
It's kind enough.

Today the sadness is like waves slamming a sea wall
I can feel the wild rising, hideous logic --
There's a past tense in there.
I'm drawing thick zigzags and and squares cubed on sticky notes
I want to say to the people around me,
It's not that I'm not friendly,
I swear to you it's not.

But you can't say things like that
So instead you say "Oh thanks" and "Is it still raining?"

Famous people seem like sugar cones
Plunged in their holders.
You never imagine their lives could flap or stagger
Or that looking out a window in winter,
The line of snow might fall behind the trees like people leaving for a party,
with them lonely in their dining rooms, socks grazing the wood floor.

And until you said, "Everyone knows life is hard, but no one ever says it," it was like
playing Murder in the Dark with no one ever finding you, no one ever saying:
You're it.

At Tonic in New York City we all came to watch you read
We came because your songs had been telling us we were perceived.
A shiny child's mirror doesn't mirror, just reflects the blurred facts of things.
To us tense and standing, close and cordoned off, you showed us funny airfields
and dogs and receptionists and boardrooms, and for once
it seemed that it wasn't all our fault.