Berrigan Wedding Coat
As yet unburied, my friend Gerry met me at the station –
His directions a mystery, he’d said OK, I’ll come fetch you –
And took me to his new house, new at least to me.
I hadn’t seen him for ten years, though I must have thought
His name a thousand times, measured myself
Against how he might have seen me
if he’d seen me
Again.
Crossing half the upper range, New York to Chicago,
I stopped hard by Erie, Gerry in the angle against the lake,
Clad, the two of us, in coats we’d bought
To celebrate the coat
Ted Berrigan had bought
to celebrate the wedding
Of Ron Padgett, we’d thought.
Berrigan died younger than me now –
the summer I was seventeen,
summer in Colorado. Judy joined me there
the next year, then Gerry the first of us
to finish school and go. And here now,
long later, he ducks his head down
and angles across the road to collect me.
The.American.Word. 