I Remember

I remember the Winter of 2011 when a group of local poets visited Bernadette Mayer at her home in Nassau.

I remember how cold it was.

I remember the only heating source in the converted open school house living room was a pot belly stove.

I remember thinking no one had cooler anecdotes of New York City poets from the sixties and seventies than Bernadette did.

I remember she spoke of her friend Joe Brainerd’s book I Remember.

I remember the deserted St Croix, Virgin Island beach my mother and I used to visit when we lived on the island.

I remember how I felt when I heard The Rockefellers were going to build a resort hotel on the site.

I remember thinking that Ferlinghetti was going to live forever.

I remember thinking I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

I remember watching the Brooklyn Dodgers play the New York Giants on the first TV we ever owned.

I remember having the mumps and my cousin coming over from next door to make sure I got chicken pox also.

I remember seeing every prewar western every made.

I remember seeing hundreds of noir classics.

I remember seeing King Kong eleven times in one week on The Million Dollar movie.

I remember my cousin saw it thirteen times.

I remember watching the Joe McCarthy House of Unamerican Activities hearing live on TV and, while I didn’t know what they were all about, not really, I thought McCarthy was a bully and a dick.

I remember my mother hiding a copy of Tropic of Cancer in her secret desk drawer and sneaking looks at it when she was at work.

I remember not getting what he was writing about but that it was dirty.

I remember she had a copy of This Is My Beloved also but she didn’t hide that book away.

I remember reading that all the way through when I was like ten and thinking the fireworks he described were pretty cool.

I remember how cool the black and white the fireworks display at the beginning of Manhattan

was the first time I saw it.

I remember that one of my cocktail waitress saying she saw the movie and it sucked.

I remember she said “…and it wasn’t even in color.”

I remember knowing how to read when I entered first grade at the Catholic school in Christiansted.

I remember I was the only one who could read in first grade and how much the nuns loved me.

I remember how it felt  to be the only non-Catholic in Catholic school.

I remember the first time I read, I Remember.

I remember the baseball game in 1965 I took my girlfriend to see.

I remember there was a centerfield to home to second base triple play in that gam and how she said, “That was a nice play.”

I remember that was the first time it had ever happened in a major league baseball game and it has only happened one more time since.

I remember I still loved her anyway no matter how unimpressed she was.

I remember the first major league game I took our kids too and missing three innings when Jose Cruz hit me on the cheekbone with a high foul ball while I was yelling, “I got it, I got it.”

I remember I would have been blind in my right eye if I had been wearing my glasses.

I remember they wanted me to go to Flushing General.

I remember a nurse telling me once if you have a choice between going to Flushing General or Bronx General and dying, die.

I remember burning my hand when I accidently hit my hand on the pot belly stove that Bernadette asking me to stoke.

I remember it hurt for weeks after.

I remember reading the memoir of Pasternak, I Remember.”

I remember seeing selections from Roman Vishniac’s, A Vanished World, at the State Museum of New York at Albany and crying.

I remember reading poetry at the reading Against the End of the World just down the block from the State Museum.

I remember seeing an exhibition on the Atomic Bomb age at the museum and seeing my first Laurie Anderson work for art, “The Singing Brick.”

I remember writing a poem against the end of the world called the Singing Brick.

I remember it was in a musically themed, against the end of the world book of poems called, Stop Making Sense.

I remember the first poem I ever published in sixth grade, in the mimeo class reader, The Fledgling.

I remember the poem was a pastiche of the song Old Dan Tucker.

I remember duck and cover drills in Centre Avenue Elementary School.

I remember how stupid they were given how close we were to New York City and how many huge glass windows there were in all the classrooms.

I remember the poem I published in the group photo/poem book commemorating our trip to Bernadette’s house.

I remember the title of my poem was, “Emergency Drills, Centre Avenue Elementary School, East Rockaway, N.Y, 1958.”

I remember the first time I saw Throne of Blood in grad school.

I remember the first time I saw Hiroshima Mon Amour in grad school.

I remember the first time I saw the Japanese movie, After Life.

I remember seeing four Brooklyn Dodgers home runs in a row.

I remember we didn’t get the foul ball that Jose Cruz hit me with.

I remember torrential rain on a tin roof on St Croix.

I remember playing spin the bottle and never being kissed.

I remember the high school psychologist telling me I should practice Rorschach inkblots so I could take her test.

I remember refusing to take the test because I thought it was stupid and I didn’t see anything suggestive in those blots.

I remember her telling me I second guessed myself all the time.

I remember her telling me I should trust my instincts because my first thoguht was almost always the right.

I remember how useful an observation that turned out to be.

I remember every two weeks for three years in the nightclub trying to guess which of the new band members was the drummer.

I remember I was only wrong once.

I remember thee guessing game as a process of elimination until you found the crazy one; he would be the drummer.

I remember seeing my first Bergman movie.

I remember seeing Last Year at Marienbad three time in four days in grad school.

I remember not paying attention in my first psychology class lesson in college on the Stanford Binet test.

I remember the teacher trying to make an example of me by giving me the block test graduating in difficulty as the numbers increased starting at six of ten.

I remember I did six, seven, eight and nine as fast as she could put them in front of me.

I remember how stunned she was.

I remember not mentioning having taken that test less the three years ago along with every other test they had on offer.

I remember the summer I first heard Leonard Cohen’s song, Suzanne.

I remember seeing the photo exhibit Requiem by the photographers killed in Vietnam at the Eastman House not long before 9-11.

I remember that exhibits was as quiet as a funeral and all the people who were crying at it.

I remember it was how I felt when I finally got to see The Wall in DC.