His Toy, His Dream, His Rest

by John Berryman

  But to return, to return to Hemingway

  that cruel & gifted man.

  Mercy! my father; do not pull the trigger

  or all my life I’ll suffer from your anger

  killing what you began.

  236

  When Henry swung, in that great open square,

  the crowd was immense, the little clouds were white

  and it was all well done.

  It’s true he did it, because more to bear

  of her open eyes & mute mouth at midnight

  behind her little counter

  by the others mangled, trying on her throat

  with a lard knife: he took his shoemaker’s

  and it was all well done.

  For more to bear he could, ha he could not

  with a lard knife. His guilty thought had had takers

  and here they were at it.

  And the rest got off & somehow here he swings

  in the open air of an Edinburgh morning

  for an impulse of mercy.

  Who’s good, who’s evil, whose tail or whose wings

  crosses his failing mind. The stop was mourning

  and it was all well done.

  237

  When in the flashlights’ flare the adultering pair

  sat up with horror under the crab-apple tree

  (soon to be hacked away for souvenirs)

  and with their breasts & brains waited, & with ears

  while masked & sheeted figures silently—

  ‘Kneel, I-love,’ he stammered, ‘and pray,’ Henry was there.

  When four shots snapped, one for the Reverend,

  her sick howl, three for her, in the heads, all fatal, and

  when her throat is slit so deep the backbone eddies,

  her worshipful foolish letters strewn between the bodies,

  her tongue & voice-box out, his calling card

  tipped up by his left heel, Henry was toward.

  When to the smokeless mild celestial air

  they came reproved & forgiven, her soul hurrying after his,

  when bright with wisdom of the risen Lord

  enthroned, they swam toward where what may be IS

  and with the rest Mrs Mills, larynx & tongue restored,

  choiring Te Deum, Henry was not there.

  238

  Henry’s Programme for God

  ‘It was not gay, that life.’ You can’t ‘make me small,’

  you can’t ‘put me down’ or take away my job.

  I am immune,

  although it is not gay. Why did we come at all,

  consonant to whose bidding? Perhaps God is a slob,

  playful, vast, rough-hewn.

  Perhaps God resembles one of the last etchings of Goya

  & not Valesquez, never Rembrandt no.

  Something disturbed,

  ill-pleased, & with a touch of paranoia

  who calls for this thud of love from his creatures-O.

  Perhaps God ought to be curbed.

  Not only on this planet, I admit; somewhere.

  Our only resource is bleak denial or

  anti-potent rage,

  both have been tried by our wisest. Who was it back there

  who died unshriven, daring to see what more

  could happen to a painter with such courage?

  239

  Am I a bad man? Am I a good man?

  —Hard to say, Brother Bones. Maybe you both,

  like most of we.

  —The evidence is difficult to structure towards deliberate evil.

  But what of the rest? Does it wax for wrath

  in its infinite complexity?

  She left without a word, for Ecuador.

  I would have liked to discuss more with her this thing

  through the terrible nights.

  She was than Henry wiser, being younger or

  a woman. She brought me Sanka and violent drugs

  which were yet wholly inadequate.

  My doctor doubles them daily. Am I a bad one—

  I’m thinking of them fires & their perplexness—

  or may a niche be found

  in nothingness for completely exhausted Henry?

  But it comes useless to canvass this alone,

  out of her eyes and sound.

  240

  Air with thought thick, air scratched. The desks are hinged,

  I foresee, for storing. And when a while has changed

  (the people are hinged too,

  for storing) … But now they are taking our exams

  and the great room is busy with still Damns.

  The proctor’s hinged & blue,

  that’s me. The desks come out (I come not out)

  each August on the mountain and bear thought.

  I feel they do not mind.

  I don’t know. Maybe the gross creation howls

  with storage & returns. Rings full of towels

  wheel, both fighters are blind,

  nobody passes, neither—of all—at length

  Miss Jewell’s eyes & Mr Torrey’s strength.

  My rafters bulge with death

  kindly arising from creaking bodies, from

  my hundreds braining & self-burdensome

  yawning down there, catching their breath.

  241

  Father being the loneliest word in the one language

  and a word only, a fraction of sun & guns

  ’way ’way ago,

  on a hillside, under rain, maneuvers, once,

  at big dawn. My field-glasses surpass—he sang—

  yours.

  Wicked & powerful, shy Henry lifted his head with an offering.

  Boots greeted him & it.

  I raced into the bank,

  my bank, after two years, with healthy cheques

  & nobody seem to know me: was I ex-:

  like Daddy??

  O. O … I can’t help feel I lift’ the strain,

  toward bottom. Games is somewhat too, but yet

  certains improve

  as if upon their only. We grinned wif wuv

  for that which each of else was master of.

  Christen the fallen.

  242

  About that ‘me.’ After a lecture once

  came up a lady asking to see me. ‘Of course.

  When would you like to?’

  Well, now, she said. ‘Yes, but I have a lunch-

  eon—’ Then I saw her and shifted with remorse

  and said ‘Well; come on over.’

  So we crossed to my office together and I sat her down

  and asked, as she sat silent, ‘What is it, miss?’

  ‘Would you close the door?’

  Now Henry was perplexed. We don’t close doors

  with students; it’s just a principle. But this

  lady looked beyond frown.

  So I rose from the desk & closed it and turning back

  found her in tears—apologizing—‘No,

  go right ahead,’ I assur-

  ed her, ‘here’s a handkerchief. Cry.’ She did, I did. When she got control, I said ‘What’s the matter—if you want to talk?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing’s the matter.’ So.

  I am her.

  243

  An undead morning. I … shuffle my poss’s.

  Lashed here, with ears, in the narrows, memoried,

  like a remaining man,

  he call to him for discomfort blue-black losses,

  gins & green girls, drag of the slaying weed.

  Just when it began again

  I will remember, soon. All will be, soon.

  The little birds are crazed. Survive us, gulls.

  A hiss from distant space

  homes in the overcast—to their grown tune—

  dead on my foaming galley. Feel my pulse.

  Is it the hour to replace my face?

  Dance in the gunwales to what they cannot hear

  my lorn men. I b
ear every piece of it.

  Often, in the ways to come,

  where the sun rises and fulfils their fear,

  unlashed, I’ll whistle bits.

  Through the mad Pillars we are bound for home.

  244

  Calamity Jane lies very still

  her soles to Wild Bill’s skull

  whose sudden guns are gone

  The pike what leapt is trash

  a sun-discoloured flash she lookt on

  that time That time is gone

  Gold seen soils the whild hills

  the braided sky A woman is kinder

  Her gun was not his own

  In girdle & bra go forth to war & mines

  her horse (Ha! ha!) is whiffs of bone

  All that was heat lightning & one vivid blunder

  Turning I see in silk & pearl

  pliant while the gale does down

  in the canyons of summer cold

  Jane, Middleton’s girl,

  Yankee ladies, Joan—behold

  with a hot sigh they lie down

  245

  A Wake-Song

  (K’s first administration seen in the light of the relevant history)

  Find me a sur-vivid fool, find me another

  able to run the first, find me two fools

  with an absence of skills

  and each must do precisely sublimely the same

  & pry on each other, under,—and lest this be seen

  let there in their offices sub-fools

  with sub-fools interfere: doing aught else—

  (there is a work called The Republic): over them set

  an Ivy appointee

  who knows about from no & nowhere; also then

  let the elected officials (none though in jail)

  diarrhea about Democracy,

  starting with the Harlem vicer. By a friction-vote

  barely let Boston millions in, dies the opponent

  (in public opinion,

  the crude of the ’papers). Keep on doing that.

  I personally have voted Democratic all my life

  and hate foreign ideas.

  1) Our contempt for our government is mildly traditional, as represented by the communistic fascists Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Edmund Wilson, and other mad-dogs.

  2) Anyone’s professional experience with our officials moronic will instruct him. Although with a lawyer’s stupidity they cannot get a date right, their demands are Pharaoh’s, until you make them cringe; whom we support, whose servants they purport to be.

  246

  Flaps, on winter’s first day, loosely the flag

  across thorns, a thorny tree like a sniper,

  like our enthusiasm,

  and the spread asylum in a spirit’s

  which we don’ call it. Henry too drifts sag—after

  what time his baby borns.

  Ten feeding big birds treating with contempt

  Sir squirrel, with lazy flaps of 18 inches;

  Henry they do not like,

  & leave. His morning’s not one the sun skimpt,

  woods mild & freckled below Geriatrics.

  Our old set of cinches

  seem to ’ve come down in the world—what’s the phrase,

  I haven’t drunk a drink in 7 days,

  they’re in a flap, a bind, almost but not quite free.

  To each blow something new crunched.

  I wish my girl would out. The old man hunched

  blind-sober on his porch like me.

  247

  Henry walked as if he were ashamed

  of being in the body. This did not last

  forever him

  but many of his moments best on it he blamed;

  so complex, man. He rooted in our past,

  his future shrinking slim.

  ‘His Majesty, the Body’ Kafka wrote

  a terrible half-truth. Visions of beauty drew

  all him from his affairs,

  O treacherous eyes! On a transatlantic boat

  a lady seen not met ran him like the crew

  & Captain. Thicker fears

  condensed on him like ice, should he meet her.

  A tiger watches from a vector. Ah,

  watch we that tiger back,

  and chance is King, a jacket lined with fur

  for June, while viruses in the back seat clamour

  for the whole man glowing black.

  248

  Snowy of her breasts the drifts, I do believe,

  although I have not been there. Mild her voice

  and often for no reason secrecies.

  A healthy peasant out of this might weave

  an ugly story, when we might rejoice

  but let’s not bother. For size,

  she’s medium. She is no mathematician.

  Nor is Henry, and in that they’re one.

  Of other congruence

  we’ll less say. The sky begins to blond

  this tiger-lily here in Sarah’s pot

  blonds, with the consequences

  Dream on of a private life but you won’t make it

  Your fated life is public, lest we cheer,

  take it easy, kid.

  You lie uneasy whom we all endear

  where storms come down from the mountains

  The dog a rug away is munching a bone.

  249

  Bushes lay low. Uneven grass even lay low.

  (The parking lot was tranquil.) Great sky hung dark.

  We hurried. A spattering

  pursued us to the orange old Chevrolet

  and I was off to spit a double lecture,

  tired in the cortex, flat

  out but upright, wise with notes. I love storms;

  I loathe this wisdom Henry gives of. Help?

  Yes, to the attentive children,—

  who only, at twenty, into each other’s arms

  would care to be confided, but don’t dare

  and who are neither men

  nor not, nor women not. And sixty do not care

  and they are bored with the electrifying air

  & the Don & thunder-claps.

  And I am bored. That’s a lie. But six are wild

  quietly for the question of the length of the hairs

  on the mole of his girl. Child,

  250

  sád sights. A crumpled, empty cigarette pack.

  O empty bottle. Hey: an empty girl.

  Fill ’er up, pal.

  I cough my proper blood. A time advances, black

  & full? when I won’t hafta. Seconal:…

  no. Let’s put the road on the show.

  As folk-talk (what we have for proverbs) swirl

  the valid & a mad; yeah, mad, and so

  the valid, man.

  Often I had to mutter what hurt an’

  (while sunsets rose in the clothes of the field of God)

  what kin hurt on …

  I fit the holster. I was not sight-seein’.

  I loved her and she killed me. That be so.

  I killed her all, too.

  The ability of sleep leaves you forever. Odd.

  So musing, they blew the whistle on The Cat

  which was that.

  251

  Walking, Flying—I

  Henry wandered: west, south, north, and East,

  sometimes for money, sometimes for relief,

  sometimes of pure fatigue,

  sometimes a stroller through the mental feast

  found him at Schwetzingen or Avila

  or the Black Hills in Dakota,

  found him in bizarre Tangier or outside Dublin

  or inside the Palais des Papes at Avignon

  where the guide suddenly sang

  to show off the acoustics or in the Lakes to relax.

  He admired the fantastic airway into Hong Kong

  all circling peaks & waters,

  and sweated in the airport appertaining to Bangkok;

  but mostly trave
l is missing, by a narrow margin,

  things desired: Elephanta,

  the Badlands; once a dinner fellow-guest & I

  reckoned up merely what each missed during his months in India:

  together we made the whole subcontinent sigh.

  252

  Walking, Flying—II

  We hit the great cities (only I missed Madras),

  He missed Bhuvaneshwar & Pataliputra

  without having seen which

  one can scarcely claim one visited the land.

  One-down-manship we practiced: Konarak both missed,

  for diverse & trivial & fatal

  reasons. Besides, he was travelling. I was working,

  on loan from the State Department,

  Henry, less unreliable O than they,

  doing it again I’d do it at a saunter, like

  Old Ben in Paris, when as we were young

  & our country regarded as a tyke.

  Travel’s a plague. But that’s no matter. So is home.

  It’s paying out cash everyday that actually bugs you.

  Isn’t getting rid of old friends

  worth it? And the destruction of mail en route

  worth anything? Accompanies the combers foam

  into which we dive too.

  253

  Walking, Flying—III

  He shopped down Siaghin, and through Sierpes,

  threading Chandni-Chauk he brought off coups,

  with the Champs-Elysées likewise

  was Henry not unfamiliar: as of antiques

  & rare books he murmured ‘Whose?’

  O he askt little questions & glanced at the eyes

  of the avid seller, sior.

  That was in Venice. Once to me in Venice

  a man told a fact. I lookt into his eyes

  and I saw he wanted less:

  I found myself in a position to check this fact

  but didn’t: life is hard enough for everybody:

  Honour wanders: I bought it.

  On John R st. in Detroit he made a bargain.

  He has been shopping around the streets of the world

  decades & woes—and how does he show for it?

  ‘Ashes, ashes. All fall down.’

  Siaghin was nothing. It was into the Casbah

  at midnight where he was truly taken,

  out of his prone for products.