Gratitude on the Zócalo

Poetry from Anselm Berrigan and Happy Chanukah!

Oaxaca Zócalo, December 2025.

Last week I had breakfast with my friend Pat on the Zócalo, the big town square in Oaxaca centro. Pat and I try and get together once a month or so. We became close during Covid when circumstances would seem to throw us together. Which was pretty hard to do since almost everything was closed down. But somehow Pat and I would see each other every week or so.

These days, it’s for breakfast. Usually I’m coming in from the rancho, dropping the car off at the house in town, and walking down to the big plaza. Pat lives outside the city too, except in the complete opposite direction (I’m coming from southeast of town, he’s coming from northwest). Last week though it was time for car maintenance and so I dropped the car off at the Toyota dealership and walked the 2 miles or so into centro (I really like to walk…)

It’s hard to get mediocre food in southern Mexico. You have to try. Where we meet, the breakfasts are just a step up from that. Pat noted that he always order the vegetarian omelet, hoping this time it will sing. As usual, it didn’t. I had the huevos a la mexicana, which were good but just. We agreed, that the one thing they never mess up at this restaurant is the entomatadas (tortillas covered in a rich, slightly spicy tomato sauce) or the enfrijoladas (tortillas, again, only this time in a sauce from beans). For some protein, an egg or chicken. Already I’m pretty sure that next time one of those is my order (stay tuned…).

So why go there? One because the Zócalo can be lovely, with its band shell, its benches and trees, the gardens. With shops and restaurants on two sides, government offices on the third, and the metropolitan cathedral on the fourth, it’s always humming with activity, full of people, vendors, street musicians of all kinds. Right now it’s been decorated for Christmas. At its heart, Oaxaca remains a sleepy kind of town, one that closes early at night, even on the weekends. The Zócalo, though, always feels alive, no matter the time of day. It can be quite the show.

Pat and Mary dancing at Pat’s 90th birthday party earlier this fall.

Pat and I talked the way we always do, with a kind of relaxed intensity, the conversation ranging from politics to theology, recovery, baseball, and football, to family, friends and our lives in Oaxaca and in those United States. Pat and his wife, Mary, have lived here since 2002. Something about Pat? Though you wouldn’t know it on first meeting him? He turned 90 this past fall. There’s a whole lot of accumulated wisdom there.

Usually when Pat and I finish breakfast, we walk around the Zócalo a little in the direction of a parking garage just north of the square. This week though I had a doctor’s appointment and was going south and east. So we shook hands and hugged and off I went. And that’s when, only a block or two later, something hit me. Something very hard.

Gratitude. I was overwhelmed suddenly by wave of gratitude unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. As I’ve noted in the last few posts of Poet in Mexico, there’s been some curveballs and changeups coming at us, making the balancing act of life a little difficult.

Yet there, then, I just got hit. It had been a radiant morning, sun and blue skies, a morning chill that was suddenly warm and comfortable. Comforting even. Something Pat had said over breakfast—we had been talking about certain linkages between Jungian thought and scientific developments within the context of contemporary theology— and Pat had remarked, with a kind of studied determination, I think I’m beginning to figure this out. 90 years old and he’s searching, investigating, learning, making a difference in the world.

I looked around, at all the life of Oaxaca, at the activity and life here on these streets, I looked up and out at the backdrop mountains on on side, at the open space leading to the Oaxaca valley on the other.

I thought of the friends we’ve made here, thought of the life we have, the things we get to do. The life in town, life in the country. I thought about how much I’ve learned since we moved here, about the world, my place in it. I thought about poetry and engagement. I was reminded of Keats and his idea of this world as a vale of soul-making. I felt this peace, this sudden Yes as an answer to the woes of all the No.

That peace translated into so much gratitude. To feeling it and seeing why and a desire to say it loud and on the page. Gratitude for the morning, for the moment. How in that instant a kind of rightness with the world. So this week? A shout out to my friend Pat, for helping spark it all. For that sudden, welcome, great big Wow.

Some Poetry

I’ve known Anselm Berrigan for a number of years, though, as with a number of people on the NYC poetry scene, for a long time I couldn’t say I knew him well. Anselm and I had read together once, in 2010?, 2011? 2012? along with his brother Eddie, at the Ethical Culture Society, as part of an evening arranged by a friend of theirs who was a student of mine at the time. Anselm, who has published some 20 books, generously blurbed one of mine, A Map of the Winds (Lavender Ink, 2013), and I’ve always been grateful for that.

Which is why it was a real pleasure to spend some good time with him last April at the New Orleans Poetry Festival. Our reading schedules overlapped to the point that neither of us could see the other read, but we had a couple of chances for longer conversations, touching on our lives, our work, the state of the world. A few months later I reached out to Anselm about contributing poems for Poet in Mexico, thinking that maybe they could come from his recent book, Don’t Forget to Love Me (Wave Books, 2024). This was shortly before his mom, Alice Notley, had passed away. Anselm was in Paris doing what he could to help out his poetry icon parent and thought that putting together some poems would be a good idea. Alice died soon after and we put a hold on things. Then Anselm sent me a long poem, a work in progress, a meditation of life and grief. He wasn’t sure it was ready, but it seemed to me it certainly was.

I don’t think the poem need any commentary from me, other than to say it moves me a lot. Anselm is a terrific poet and here one sees that, in the frame of someone wanting to make sense of loss and grief, of friendships and family, of memory, how living delivers life.

The poem is too long to publish here in its entirety. Unfortunately. I look forward to seeing it in his next book. It’s with pleasure tinged with some sadness I welcome my friend Anselm Berrigan to Poet in Mexico.

Anselm reading.

from what is the purpose of a guinea hen

I.

I didn’t have a bug on my back
but I did bring two dog ticks to

New York from Vermont recently
You know how some words are 

dysfunctional? Literally is one of 
them. You think you’re being emphatic 

saying that literally happened, but it 
would be of greater strength and acuity 

to say that happened, even if you’re not 
especially fond of reserve. This could 

be said to be a matter of character
such as you are in your own works

and their days. We would like to think 
all doctors, having taken the hippocratic 

oath, will be good at their jobs, the tasks 
of which at hand are many, as with poets

But I’ve had bad doctors and great doctors
and the difference is not hard to suss out -- 

pain will make you understand who’s good 
at their job. You don’t want your doctor 

being a fifty-five percenter, when it comes
to attention to your physical particulars

I had one surgeon have to sew up my hernias 
two times, and somehow the jobs didn’t take

I don’t know if he was good or bad -- some
times it’s all genetics, which feels like a cop out

whatever that is -- see you later officer -- 
you will just have these holes opening up 

in your belly and that’s that. Call us when 
the next one opens and your intestine 

starts poking through again. Ok. The 
French medical system is more humane 

than the American system -- that is in fact 
true. Mainly because the French take money 

mostly out of the system’s equation, for you
and A-mericans aren’t taught how to understand 

the practicality of such separation. That doesn’t
mean there aren’t expenses -- when our mother 

died recently, we had to pony up 3200 euros 
for cremation a casket and an urn. Do you want 

flowers? Nah. Do you guys want music? Nah 
dude. You get thirty minutes in a room to do 

a ceremony. Ok. Do you want to project any 
images? No. Do you want to come to hospital

& ride in the car with the casket to Pere La Chaise? 
No! We’ll take the Metro -- it’ll be faster. 

The undertaker got it -- we wanted to read 
some poems, keep it plain and keep the cost

down. But the hospital bill after a month of 
Mom being there, and a surgery to remove 

one of her kidneys, and a biopsy and endless 
scans and tests and shots and morphine near the 

end we didn’t see, when her neuropathy pain 
was overwhelming, but not enough that we

couldn’t keep talking, about the pain, the music
the poems, our family, our friends, the state

of the world, as we fought to understand, our
stupid country and all its qualities, our humor...

plus regular meals three times a day, she said 
they weren’t bad, when she could keep the food 

down, & kind and well-trained nurses, on hand 
at all points, mostly? No bill. Everything was 

handled as matter of ordinary course. Alice
never stopped talking with anyone near her. 

V.

Turns out if you run in circles
with folks every day for months

at a stretch you can make friends
I wouldn’t have put it that way

at the time but that’s what I think
happened to me when I was 15 &

16 in high school at the prestigious 
public but you have to take a test to 

get in Stuyvesant of the pegleg: horrible... 
worse than whatever Brando’s Kurtz 

went through I mean nobody was 
filming me from the head down

to hide my what but just school ok
So I went from having two friends

Ulysses and Daryl -- hi guys
to a bunch more and some of their 

friends and every day we - most of us 
would meet up after classes were done 

but before homework had to be done 
and go run in circles together -- the

x-county team ran in non-circles 
sometimes or longer non-ones -- 

the reservoir at central park is a type 
of circle but whatever those paths

are in Van Cortland Park are not -- 
and x-country was a little more fun

because we didn’t have or need a coach 
but track indoor & outdoor you run 

in circles, in incredible growing legions
of pain, and you bond with the people 

you’re running in circles with because you 
know it sucks, together, and you’re supposed

to be smart so why are you subjecting 
yrself to this shit and the other athletes 

on other teams at Stuy and other schools
don’t respect you & the coach maybe
 
respects you if he’s coming around
and yr former teammates who bailed 

don’t respect you but might pretend to
& no one watches or goes to the meets 

and you won’t still even go on a date until 
you’re two years into college but these 

are the names that I conjure when I need 
to remember without knowing the need

is even there when I remember who helped
me start to become a person who could

talk and get to know other kids and be some
thing like happy again after some hard years:

Wahley, Ji, Danny, Carlo, Gen, Jun, Tito 
(Sumatra), Surendranauth, Brian, Kathy J &
 
Kathy M, Sylvia, Mike, Michael, James
Mervin, David Rhee, Betty, Lyle, David 

Tsai, Anthony, Waylon, Noam, Wendy
Noel, Duncan, Coach Dennis, I have no 

idea where most of you are, other than 
in my heart, & this thing I call a poem.


VI.


That said, we should have maybe let Trump nuke that hurricane

his first time around as president -- it would have been catastrophic

but I don’t think he’d have been reelected, I could be wrong

but I don’t think you reelect the person who nukes the hurricane

We might -- we might is all I’m suggesting now -- this is a forum here for imagination 

don’t forget that before you freak out on me, however elsewhere you might be 

we might be better off with a nuked hurricane and no second Trump presidency

Now I’m just sitting here talking out loud to myself and saying really amazing things

but its weirding out the folks around me who are noticing that I’m just talking to myself 

it’s late and I’m talking out loud to myself about how weird it would be to read everything

someone ever wrote -- I was thinking about Ron -- I don’t need to read what he just wrote yesterday

or what he was writing when he was 15 and his dad was a bootlegger -- though I would

but not for research -- just out of curiosity which might be the same thing some times

but not all the time and Ron was reading French poetry by surrealists in translation -- and maybe

we have to acknowledge the French are so strange to the point where someone really bonkers

like Magritte, is just another guy for them -- that’s not true -- I’m just thinking about Magritte

who was very much only who he had to be, and his mom died when he was young and it makes me upset

but I also get it but I can’t be putting no hood over anybody’s head, but I understand and was he more of 

a fantast than a surrealist -- as CC and PG posited -- in that unpublished interview I sent you

and maybe even made you read aloud from so we could talk about the difference between

fantasy & enigma? Hi. I miss you too. Sort of. But really surrealism is just a pathway to talking 

about baseball, the players will say it’s really surreal when something cool happens and they

have to talk about it live, because professional sports is about the last live tv thing that goes on

and I’m sitting somewhere and I’m thinking that’s not surreal, that’s a dream’s script turned into fate

turned into you and there are no animal heads or pretend-random breasts on your gear 

but then for a kid who is 22 and just learning english in order to do a job that is a game

that is really hard and demanding but can pay well but you have to go to weird places to work 

that you wouldn’t likely choose to go hang out at, and then someone puts a mic in your face 

and asks you how you feel? That could be called surreal. In the song Daisy Dukes 

the rapper rhymes on with on: “look at those girls wythe the Daisy Dukes on / 

they really got it going on” - I remember that. And I know I can do that. Because they 

did that. And got a certain amount of mileage out of jean shorts worn by Catherine Bach 

in a show that came on before Dallas once a week that I used to watch with Mom & Eddie

Bobby dreamed a whole season. The dukes drove a car named the general lee. The cops 

were corrupt bumblers but deep down there were supposed to be fragments of heart. 

Remember when Mike Tyson said everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face? 

All the sports writers did. Politicians borrow sports language all the time, and don’t 

know shit about sources. Sources don’t always make it to the surface. Why should they 

have to? Do you remember last year? The jacket is furniture. I have to fix, I have to fix all 

the tools. Oh Daddy, who can stand it? What a strange life. We keep saying things to stay. 

Anselm Berrigan, photo by Paola Valenzuela.

Good Links: Anselm, France, Peter, Paul, and Mary

Don’t Forget to Love Me, Anselm Berrigan (Wave Books, 2024)

This is a terrific book and had Anselm not sent me the above long poem, I’d have printed poems from it. As always, my recommendation is you go to your local independent bookstore and order a copy. Suggest they order a few more for their poetry section. Support your local bookstore! Support your independent literary presses! https://www.wavepoetry.com/products/dont-forget-to-love-me

Blue Snow, France de Griessen, 2025

This video was released this past week, with a screening in Paris, and here already on YouTube. It was filmed by Cannonball Statman and features this wonderful song that will be on France de Griessen’s new album, coming out in February 2026.

Light One Candle, Peter, Paul, and Mary, 1988

Chanukah/Hanukkah is a holiday of freedom, justice, and love, and the candles on the menorah—and Peter, Pauli and Mary—remind me why we mustn’t fail.

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