And poor Mr Eliot and the Admiral
Have come, and a damned word nobody can hear.
Two centuries here have been abused our youth:
(Your grey eyes pierce the miles to meet my eyes)
The bicentennial of an affair with truth
(In the southern noon whom do you tyrannize?)
Not turned out well: the cast girl sucks her tooth.
(Secret, let us be true time crucifies.)
[ 21 ]
Whom undone David into the dire van sent
I’d see as far. I can’t dislike that man,
Grievously and intensely like him even,
Envy nor jealousy admit, consent
Neither to the night of rustlers I frequent
Nor to this illness dreams them; but I can,
Only, that which we must: bright as a pan
Our love gleams, empty almost empty—lent.
. . Did he, or not, see? I stood close to you
But our lips had broken and you could reply . .
And is he clement? does he give us rope?
It is the owner drives one crazy, who
Came, or luck brought him, first; a police spy;
A kind and good man; with a gun; hunts hope.
[ 22 ]
If not white shorts—then in a princess gown
Where gaslights pierce the mist I’d have your age,
Young in a grey gown, blonde and royal, rage
Of handlebars at Reisenweber’s, frown
Or smile to quell or rally half the town,
To polka partners mad, to flout the stage,
To pale The Lily to an average
Woman, looking up from your champagne, or down.
Myself, ascotted, still dumb as a mome
Drinking your eyes . . No Bill comes by to cadge
A Scotch in Rector’s, waving his loose tongue.
I tip my skimmer to your friend who clung
Too long, blue-stocking cracked on the Red Badge
Stevie’s becoming known for . . We drive home.
[ 23 ]
They may suppose, because I would not cloy your ear—
If ever these songs by other ears are heard—
With ‘love’ and ‘love’, I loved you not, but blurred
Lust with strange images, warm, not quite sincere,
To switch a bedroom black. O mutineer
With me against these empty captains! gird
Your scorn again above all at this word
Pompous and vague on the stump of his career.
Also I fox ‘heart’, striking a modern breast
Hollow as a drum, and ‘beauty’ I taboo;
I want a verse fresh as a bubble breaks,
As little false … Blood of my sweet unrest
Runs all the same—I am in love with you—
Trapped in my rib-cage something throes and aches!
[ 24 ]
Still it pleads and rankles: ‘Why do you love me?’
Replies then jammed me dumb; but now I speak,
Singing why each should not the other seek—
The octet will be weaker—in the fishful sea.
Your friends I don’t like all, and poetry
You less than music stir to, the blue streak
Troubles me you drink: if all these are weak
Objections, they are all, and all I foresee.
Your choice, though! . . Who no Goliath has slung low.
When one day rushing about your lawn you saw
Him whom I might not name without some awe
If curious Johnson should enquire below,
‘Who lifts this voice harsh, fresh, and beautiful?’
—‘As thy soul liveth, O king, I cannot tell.’
[ 25 ]
Sometimes the night echoes to prideless wailing
Low as I hunch home late and fever-tired,
Near you not, nearing the sharer I desired,
Toward whom till now I sailed back; but that sailing
Yaws, from the cabin orders like a failing
Dribble, the stores disordered and then fired
Skid wild, the men are glaring, the mate has wired
Hopeless: locked in, and humming, the Captain’s nailing
A false log to the lurching table. Lies
And passion sing in the cabin on the voyage home,
The burgee should fly Jolly Roger: wind
Madness like the tackle of a crane (outcries
Ascend) around to heave him from the foam
Irresponsible, since all the stars rain blind.
[ 26 ]
Crouched on a low ridge sloping to where you pour
No doubt a new drink late this easy night,
The tooth-drawn town dreams . . censorless, can bite
Rebellion, bodies mauled . . but breaks a snore.
Hessians maraud no more, coaches no more
Crash off north, south; only a smooth car’s flight
Hums where the brains rest, an old parasite
Sniff then for breakfast while from Bach you soar
Easy and live in the summer dawn, my striker!
Nothing the borough lets be made here, lest
The professors and the millionaires from bed
Be startled, the Negroes drop trays, build. The tiger
Sprang off heraldic colours into the West,
Where he snoozes . . glossy, and substantially dead.
[ 27 ]
In a poem made by Cummings, long since, his
Girl was the rain, but darling you are sunlight
Volleying down blue air, waking a flight
Of sighs to follow like the mourning iris
Your shining-out-of-shadow hair I miss
A fortnight and to-noon. What you excite
You are, you are me: as light’s parasite
For vision on . . us. O if my syncrisis
Teases you, briefer than Propertius’ in
This paraphrase by Pound—to whom I owe
Three letters—why, run through me like a comb:
I lie down flat! under your discipline
I die. No doubt of visored others, though . .
The broad sky dumb with stars shadows me home.
[ 28 ]
A wasp skims nearby up the bright warm air,
Immobile me, my poem of you lost
Into your image burning, a burning ghost
Between the bricks and fixed eyes, blue despair
To spell you lively in this summerfare
Back from your death of distance, my lute tossed
Down, while my ears reel to your marriage, crossed
Brass endless, burning on my helpless glare.
After eighteen years to the Rue Fortunée
Balzac brought Hanska, the Count dead and the lover
Not well to live, home, where the black lock stuck
Stuck! stuck! lights blazed, the crazy valet smashed away,
Idlers assembled, a smith ran to discover—
Ten weeks, and then turned in (like mine) his luck.
[ 29 ]
The cold rewards trail in, when the man is blind
They glitter round his tomb (no bivouac) :
The Rue Fortunée is the Rue de Balzac,
The Bach-Gesellschaft girdles the world; unsigned,
The treaty rages freeing him to wind
Mankind about an icy finger. Pack
His laurel in, startle him with gimcrack
Recognition.—But O do not remind
Of the hours of morning this indifferent man
When alone in a summery cloud he sweat and knew
She, she would not come, she would not come, now
Or all the lime-slow day … Your artisan
And men’s, I tarry alike for fame and you,
Not hoping, tame, tapping my warm blank brow.
[ 30 ]
Of all that weeks-long day, though call it back
If I will I can—rain thrice
, sheets, a torrent
Spaced by the dry sun, Sunday thirst that went
Sharp-set from town to town, down cul-de-sac
To smoke a blind pig for a liquid snack,
Did ever beer taste better, when opulent
Over the State line with the State’s consent
We cleared our four throats, climbing off the rack;
Lost our way then: our thirst again: then tea
With a velvet jacket over the flowered choker
Almost a man, who copied tulips queerer:
Dinner a triumph—of that day I have wholly
One moment (weeks I played the friendly joker)
Your eyes married to mine in the car mirror.
[ 31 ]
Troubling are masks . . the faces of friends, my face
Met unawares and your face: where I mum
Your doubleganger writhes, wraiths are we come
To keep a festival, none but wraiths embrace;
Our loyal rite only we interlace,
Laertes’ winding-sheet done and undone
In Ithaca by day and night . . we thrum
Hopeful our shuffles, trusting to our disgrace.
Impostors . . O but our truth our fortunes cup
To flash this lying blood. Sore and austere
The crown we cry for, merely to lie ill
In grand evasion, questions not come up.—
I am dreaming on the hour when I can hear
My last lie rattle, and then lie truly still.
[ 32 ]
How can I sing, western & dry & thin,
You who for celebration should cause flow
The sensual fanfare of D’Annunzio,
Mozart’s mischievous joy, the amaranthine
Mild quirks of Marvell, Villon sharp as tin
Solid as sword-death when the man blinks slow
And accordions into the form he’ll know
Forever—voices can nearly make me sin
With envy, so they sound. You they saw not,
Natheless, alas, unto this epigone
Descends the dread labour, the Olympic hour—
When for the garden and the tape of what
We trust, one runs until lung into bone
Hardens, runs harder then . . lucky, a flower.
[ 33 ]
Audacities and fêtes of the drunken weeks!
One step false pitches all down . . come and pour
Another . . Strange, warningless we four
Locked, crocked together, two of us made sneaks—
Who can’t get at each other—midnights of freaks
On crepitant surfaces, a kiss blind from the door . .
One head suspects, drooping and vaguely sore,
Something entirely sad, skew, she not seeks . .
‘You’ll give me ulcers if all this keeps up’
You moaned . . One only, ignorant and kind,
Saves his own life useful and usual,
Blind to the witch-antinomy I sup
Spinning between the laws on the black edge, blind
Head—O do I?—I dance to disannul.
[ 34 ]
‘I couldn’t leave you’ you confessed next day.
Our law too binds. Grossly however bound
And jacketed apart, ensample-wound,
We come so little and can so little stay
Together, what can we know? Anything may
Amaze me: this did. Ah, to work underground
Slowly and wholly in your vein profound . .
Or like some outcast ancient Jew to say:
‘There is Judaea: in it Jerusalem:
In that the Temple: in the Temple’s inmost
Holy of holies hides the invisible Ark—
There nothing—there all—vast wing beating dark—
Voiceless, the terrible I AM—the lost
Tables of stone with the Law graved on them!’
[ 35 ]
Nothing there? nothing up the sky alive,
Invisibly considering? . . I wonder.
Sometimes I heard Him in traditional thunder;
Sometimes in sweet rain, or in a great ’plane, I’ve
Concluded that I heard Him not. You thrive
So, where I pine. See no adjustment blunder?
Job was alone with Satan? Job? O under
Hell-ladled morning, some of my hopes revive:
. . Less nakedly malign—loblolly—dull
Eyes on our end . . a table crumples, things
Jump and fuse, a fat voice calls down the sky,
‘Too excitable! too sensitive! thin-skull,
I am for you: I shrive your wanderings:
Stand closer, evil, till I pluck your sigh.’
[ 36 ]
Keep your eyes open when you kiss: do: when
You kiss. All silly time else, close them to;
Unsleeping, I implore you (dear) pursue
In darkness me, as I do you again
Instantly we part . . only me both then
And when your fingers fall, let there be two
Only, ‘in that dream-kingdom’: I would have you
Me alone recognize your citizen.
Before who wanted eyes, making love, so?
I do now. However we are driven and hide,
What state we keep all other states condemn,
We see ourselves, we watch the solemn glow
Of empty courts we kiss in . . Open wide!
You do, you do, and I look into them.
[ 37 ]
Sigh as it ends … I keep an eye on your
Amour with Scotch,—too cher to consummate;
Faster your disappearing beer than late-
ly mine; your naked passion for the floor;
Your hollow leg; your hanker for one more
Dark as the Sundam Trench; how you dilate
Upon psychotics of this class, collate
Stages, and . . how long since you, well, forbore.
Ah, but the high fire sings on to be fed
Whipping our darkness by the lifting sea
A while, O darling drinking like a clock.
The tide comes on: spare, Time, from what you spread
Her story,—tilting a frozen Daiquiri,
Blonde, barefoot, beautiful,
flat on the bare floor rivetted to Bach.
[ 38 ]
Musculatures and skulls. Later some throng
Before a colonnade, eagle on goose
Clampt in an empty sky, time’s mild abuse
In cracks clear down the fresco print; among
The exaggeration of poses and the long
Dogged perspective, difficult to choose
The half-forgotten painter’s lost excuse:
A vanished poet crowned by the Duke for song.
Yours crownless, though he keep four hundred years
To be mocked so, will not be sorry if
Some of you keeps, grey eyes, your dulcet lust . .
So the old fiction fools us on, Hope steers
Rather us lickerish towards some hieroglyph
Than whelms us home, loinless and sleepy dust.
[ 39 ]
And does the old wound shudder open? Shall
I nurse again my days to a girl’s sight,
Feeling the bandaged and unquiet night
Slide? Writhe in silly ecstasy? Banal
Greetings rehearse till a quotidian drawl
Carols a promise? Stoop an acolyte
Who stood my master? Must my blood flow bright,
Childish, I chilled and darkened? Strong pulse crawl?
I see I do, it must, trembling I see
Grace of her switching walk away from me
Fastens me where I stop now, smiling pain;
And neither pride don nor the fever shed
More, till the furor when we slide to bed,
Trying calenture for the raving brain.
[ 40 ]
Marble nor monuments whereof then we
spoke
We speak of more; spasmodic as the wasp
About my windowpane, our short songs rasp—
Not those alone before their singers choke—
Our sweetest; none hopes now with one smart stroke
Or whittling years to crack away the hasp
Across the ticking future; all our grasp
Cannot beyond the butt secure its smoke.
A Renaissance fashion, not to be recalled.
We dinch ‘eternal numbers’ and go out.
We understand exactly what we are.
. . Do we? Argent I craft you as the star
Of flower-shut evening: who stays on to doubt
I sang true? ganger with trobador and scald!
[ 41 ]
And Plough-month peters out . . its thermal power
Squandered in sighs and poems and hopeless thought,
Which corn and honey, wine, soap, wax, oil ought
Upon my farmling to have chivvied into flower.
I burn, not silly with remorse, in sour
Flat heat of the dying month I stretch out taut:
Twenty-four dawns the topaz woman wrought
To smile to me is gone. These days devour
Memory: what were you elbowed on your side?
Supine, your knee flexed? do I hear your words
Faint as a nixe, in our grove, saying farewells? . .
At five I get up sleepless to decide
What I will not today do; ride out: hear birds
Antiphonal at the dayspring, and nothing else.
[ 42 ]
The clots of age, grovel and palsy, crave
Mádmen: to gasp, unreasonably weep,
Gravid with ice, staving invincible sleep. . .
Still as I watch this two tonight I waive
Half of my fear, envy sues even: grave,
Easy and light with juniors, he, and steep
In his honours she, beloved, wholly they keep
Together, accustomed; hircine excitement gave
No joy so deep, and died . . Fill my eyes with tears,
I stare down the intolerable years
To the mild survival—where, you are where, where?
Berryman’s Sonnets Page 3