Edmund Berrigan

Poem for the New Year, 2013
     after Donne



The streets of Paris are a map in my mind

Of the streets of Paris my mind weathered in

I replace them with loyalties and absence

But also a presence shared now to differentiate

One mind set and replicate another.

The conditions of the previous entries no

Longer apply—sets of sadness and confusion

Replaced with different anomalies of feeling

While I rely on sensory input to motion

My advanced standing still. Landscape withers

The physical drift while matter continues

Neither created nor destroyed, but emotions

Transubstantiate from one corporeal to another,

And there, I do bring the spider love.

Edmund Berrigan is the author of two books of poetry, Disarming Matter (Owl Press, 1999) and Glad Stone Children (Farfalla, 2008), and a quasi-memoir, Can It! forthcoming from Letter Machine. He is editor of the Selected Poems of Steve Carey (Sub Press, 2009), and is co-editor with Anselm Berrigan and Alice Notley of the Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (University of California, 2005) and the Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (University of California, 2010). He is an editor for poetry mags Vlak and Brawling Pigeon, and is on the editorial board of Lungfull!