Thomas Devaney

    Thomas Devaney and Bill Berkson at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, January 2012.

  

Cold Fingers Light the Way

I read Bill’s essay on Ray, it was 100% Bill / 100% Ray.
Walked in the rain and got very soaked. 
              The old photocopy had surfaced from a personal slush pile 
in the dark lake of the TV room where I had been hiding. 
If anyone asked, I would have said I had been following the news. 
But it was more than that. I was consumed. I put my stamp on that. 

For much of Bill’s life he had been in the New York Correspondence School:
envelopes, photocopied GUM BALLS For Sale, and at least one secret love. 

I will incorporate the letters that seem appropriate in this letter which will be 
waiting for you when you return—

To the end he had a full head of white hair, stood 6’3” in his stocking feet.
And sharp words for Chelsea and all else that had gone “berserk.”

“Scratches show the surface as the surface,” more notes scribbled down. Elsewhere looking at the views as if I were seeing the feeling I longed to see and to feel.
A turn and a half-dozen more—Bill’s limpid prompt to his correspondent 
to find the courage to their own tenderness.

Envelope as a vehicle of its own. Another printed in Sharpie to WILIAM S. WILSON from RAY JOHNSON. Direct about their indirections and home.

The letters of each name, a plot as much as they are instruction for those who would bury the dead. Speaking in sweeping monologues to all of the living-room shades. King Lear of the Chesapeake, standing and gesturing in my mind, and signing-off in an email: “I cannot draw a cart, nor eat dried oats. If it be man’s work, I’ll do ’t.”