His Toy, His Dream, His Rest

by John Berryman

ilex. Your face. You jus like a flex

  where the bulb failed. Flail

  upon Bahrein, at one hundred-odd degrees

  at four in the morning, where the ofays’ cameras

  were dutyless.—

  Muscle my whack. We gotta trickle. Seize

  them Moslem testicles, and pull. Please

  hurt my owner, twice.

  274

  It’s lovely just here now in the midst of night:

  cool. I take back some of my imprecations,

  some. I turn the fan off.

  The twenty-score people who count on me for tomorrow

  probably will be satisfied. Maybe I will.

  The summer has been rough,

  I’ve booked our passage to a greener scene

  and there my soul is earning. My insulted body

  though still is earning here.

  My o’ertaxed brain, in its units, hangs on between.

  It even keeps an office hour, a strange lady

  rang up today to know when.

  We’ll do our best for the lady and the hundreds

  and we will do our best for the cause of the brain

  though sea-foam tugs

  eastward my heart, my manuscripts are ready

  for transport, and suddenly it all seems quite sane

  to a man who has rolled up the rugs.

  275

  July 11

  And yet I find myself able, at this deep point,

  to carry out my duties: I lecture, I write.

  I am even lecturing well,

  I threw two chairs the janitors had piled

  on the podium to the floor of the lecture hall:

  the students were amazed

  it was good for them, action in the midst of thought,

  an angry Zen touch, something not written down

  except in the diaries

  of the unknown devoted ones of the 115:

  ‘Master Henry is approaching his limit.’

  A little more whiskey please.

  A little more whiskey please. Something’s gotta give

  either in edgy Henry or the environment:

  the conflict cannot last,

  I soothe myself with, though for 50 years

  the war’s made headlines. Waiting for fall

  and the cold fogs thereof

  in delicious Ireland.

  276

  Henry’s Farewell—I

  He tossed a farewell party for his pals

  who all at once sat up to groom their wives

  to California’s airs,

  leaving Henryville bereft, carnivals-

  cum-intellect closed down now, off in pairs

  they flew to lead fresh lives

  alas, which was their perfect right, alas.

  Henry repaired to Dublin, showing his back,

  to thrive on shanty-talk.

  ‘They’ll miss me too’ he muttered, and ‘A sorry pass,

  when the best are so dispersed one has to chalk

  up thousands of miles for one crack

  or canny reference’ shaking his head he groaned

  and grinned at his green friends across his stout

  but his heart was not in it, his heart was out

  with the loss of friends now to be telephoned

  only when drunk and at enormous cost:

  he gnashed out a lonesome toast.

  277

  Henry’s Farewell—II

  Willing them well! He hoped would not collapse

  at once their institutions new, and houses.

  His was firm enough.

  He’d look for them hereafter on his maps,

  with wives’ details in letters: Henry loved,

  a scholar who swoops, who browses,

  the daily far routine of all his friends

  living, and he grew very good at it:

  coward is high by ten,

  mostly by noon the poets have made amends

  and downed their guilt toward that of other men,

  O and far scholars sit

  baffled or flourish! You’re for better jobs,

  I bless you in their outcomes, with a Liffey grin:

  Henry is out, you’re in,

  long-term: spark him a formula for mobs

  you’ll tally no more: here’s to your tiny classes

  tanned lads & opulent lasses

  and therefore all your grand works we’ll see win

  278

  Henry’s Farewell—III

  Fail may your enemies, abundant here,

  in that most happy clime. Play it by ear

  out there until all’s straight

  and may no rudeness interrupt your play.

  One decade’s war forget, in which, I may say,

  we’ve scarcely won a battle to this date.

  Fresh from the woodwork issued our blue foes

  botanists & peasants of elementary german

  drones, drones in the hive

  Faction ran wild & so did many vermin

  fresh from their woodwork and we bore their blows

  & carried on our work alive.

  I fear the queen is swarming, toward the west

  taking her chosen workers, for a stunt

  leaving behind her Henry.

  No harm in that, the old survival test.

  Pardon my sore toast, nominal & blunt

  & let’s get on toward the sea.

  VII

  279

  Leaving behind the country of the dead

  where he must then return & die himself

  he set his tired face due East

  where the sun rushes up the North Atlantic

  and where had paused a little the war for bread

  & the war for status had ceased

  forever, and he took with him five books,

  a Whitman & a Purgatorio,

  a one-volume dictionary,

  an Oxford Bible with all its bays & nooks

  & bafflements long familiar to Henry

  & one other new book-O.

  If ever he had crafted in the past—

  but only if—he swore now to craft better

  which lay in the Hands above.

  He said: I’ll work on slow, O slow & fast,

  if a letter comes I will answer that letter

  & my whole year will be tense with love.

  280

  Decision taken, Henry’ll be back abroad,

  from where things look more inter’sting, where things

  American are seen

  without America’s perpetual self-laud

  as if everything in America had wings,

  the world else a crawling scene,

  the world else peripheral. Now good London crimes,

  Irish & Spanish sports, Japanese disasters

  will leave him free to think.

  He’ll still have bad ol’ Time each week, & The Times,

  to clue him in to the actions of his masters.

  He bought a lot of ink,

  having much to say, masterless after all, & gay

  with probability, time being on his side,

  the large work largely done,

  over the years, the prizes mostly won,

  we work now for ourself alone, away

  even from pal & wife, in ways not to be denied.

  281

  The Following Gulls

  We missed Quebec but now the North Shore lights

  are bright against the lowered clouds of dusk,

  they come in two broad bands,

  neither of which was ever before in Henry’s sights,

  and he is preparing not for strangeness but

  familiarity’s demands.

  The manic glare with which these passengers

  took in one another is diminishing

  into routine,

  I have made my first acquaintance and one steward

  has revealed to me his secret in Florida & Duluth

  & London.

&nb
sp; After thirty Falls I rush back to the haunts of Yeats

  & others, with a new book in my briefcase

  four times too large:

  all year I must in terminal debates

  with me say who is to lives & who to dies

  before my blessed discharge.

  282

  Richard & Randall, & one who never did,

  two who will never cross this sea again,

  & Delmore,

  filled his pitted mind as the ship forged on

  I hear the three freaks in their different notes

  discussing more & more

  our meaning to the Old World, theirs to us

  which much we pondered in our younger years

  and then coughed & sang

  the new forms in which ancient thought appears

  the altering bodies of the labile souls,

  foes fang on fang.

  The lovely friends, and friends the friends of friends,

  pursuing insights to their journeys’ ends

  subtle & steadfast:

  the wind blows hard from our past into our future

  and we are that wind, except that the wind’s nature

  was not to last.

  283

  Shrouded the great stars, the great boat moves on.

  A minimum of tremor in the bar.

  Today was Children’s Day

  & the Little Twiss prinked out ah as a bunny

  won or did not win—I forget—second prize:

  I forget to say.

  I forget the great ship steaming thro’ the dark

  I forget the souls so eager for their pain.

  Two have just dropt in,

  grand ships’ officers, large heads & gold braid,

  the authority of the bartender is dwarfed

  I forget all the old

  I seem to be Henry then at twenty-one

  steaming the sea again in another British boat

  again, half mad with hope:

  with my loved Basque friend I stroll the topmost deck

  high in the windy night, in love with life

  which has produced this wreck.

  284

  The hand I shook will operate no more

  after forty years of cutting. We admire

  the blossoms of youth

  on the tall English boys.

  The sun roars on the sea today. The old are fat.

  These handsome raucous ones are said to be Rhodes scholars.

  On the whole boat one passenger knows my name

  & that’s too many. Fog has all the sea

  we drive on purposeful.

  Henry is one of the three passengers

  who is doing any work. Grins given strangers

  diminish his isolation.

  But now he lies in the golden sun & eats.

  Fun & games, the fresh acquaintances,

  with a heavy heart.

  Wide sported the sea behind, the land of art

  lay off ahead far: meanwhile chats & dances,

  trivial triumphs, defeats.

  285

  Much petted Henry like a petal throve,

  his narthex let the girls & pupils in,

  aptotic he remained

  Henry’s own man, when he squirmed not in love,

  fifty pressures herded one discipline:

  the sun shot up, it rained,

  weathering Henry kept on his own side,

  whatever in the name of God that side was.

  And he struggled, pal.

  Apricate never: too he took in his stride

  more than most monsters can. Whatever the cause

  they called him Madrigal

  and Introit, passing him on the road

  wherever they were going and were gone.

  Henry peered quite alone

  as if the worlds would answer to a code

  just around the corner, down gelid dawn,

  beckoning like a moan.

  286

  So Henry’s enemy’s lost, not paranoia

  but cancer, long. I would him very well,

  forgetful or choiring,

  whether the Great One is hiring or firing.

  Stationed there permanent, does he enjoy a

  bell for Mass, for matrimony, the passing bell?

  Henry walked the corridor in dark, drug-drunk, smoking

  and dropt it & near-sighted cannot find.

  Nurses will deal hell if the ward wakes, croaking

  to smoke antic with flame.

  All the parts of this damned floor are the same.

  He scrabbled, worried hard, with half his mind.

  Like the breakfast bell on fire

  it brings O ho it brings around again

  what miserable Henry must desire:

  aplomb

  at the temps

  of the tomb.

  287

  A best word across a void makes a hard blaze.

  Henry reacted like a snake to praise,

  he shed his skin

  appearing thenceforward in a new guise

  so the praise was for his past, he not therein,

  saving him from vanity, the mirror’s eyes,

  saving him from greed. Lean as a snake

  he staked his claim upon obscurity:

  a prayer to be left alone

  escaped him sometimes or for a middle zone

  where he could be & become both unknown & known,

  listening & not.

  A flower a year, enough to grieve him on, to the extent that one is able,

  from absolutely certain wits, he was pleased with

  & one has just now come,

  an unexpected & triumphing cable

  when least he hoped for hope, & most needed it,

  making him feel at home.

  288

  In neighbourhoods evil of noise, he deployed, Henry,

  stance unheroic. Say yes without offending.

  In our career here

  good will we too with ill. Wrinkle a grin.

  The place is not so bad, considering

  the alternative with real fear.

  Being dead, I mean. ‘Well it is a long rest’

  to himself said Mr Bloom. But is it that now?

  As one Hungarian

  Jew to another, I have seen grins that test

  our patience, pal. Things are getting out

  of hand, gaffered another one.

  Blundering, faltering, uphill all the way

  & icy. O say yes without offending.

  His heart, a mud-puddle, sang.

  ‘Serve, Serve’ it sang, and it sang that all day.

  New tasks will craze you in your happy ending.

  Let go without a pang.

  289

  It is, after all her! & in the late afternoon

  of the last day! & she is even more delightful

  than longing Henry expected:

  Parisienne, bi-lingual, teaches English,

  at 27 unmarried, for she has not found

  anyone ‘not ordinary’:

  (another couple in the Club have come to terms)

  on this last day she is more beautiful high-coloured

  even than Henry’s wife

  who is pale, pale & beautiful: Yvette’s ankles

  are slim as the thought of various poets I could mention

  & she tilts her head proudly.

  ’Twould not be possible for her to lose her dignity,

  I notice this at dusk in a rising sea,

  such an excellent lady

  I will have more to say at a later time

  with my whole cracked heart, in prose or rhyme

  of this lady of the northern sea.

  290

  Why is Ireland the wettest place on earth

  year-round, beating Calcutta in the monsoon

  & the tropical rain-forest?

  Clearly the sun has made an exception for Ireland,

  the sun growled & shone elsewhere: Iowa,r />
  detestable State.

  Adorable country, in its countryside

  & persons, & its habits, & its past,

  martyrs & heroes,

  its noble monks, its wild men of high pride

  & poets long ago, Synge, Joyce & Yeats,

  and the ranks from which they rose.

  Detestable State, made of swine & corn,

  rich & ignorant, pastless, with one great tree in it

  & doubtless certain souls

  perplexed as the Irish whether to shout or mourn

  over man’s riddling fate: alter, or stet:

  Fate across all them rolls.

  291

  Cold & golden lay the high heroine

  in a wilderness of bears. His spirit fled

  upon this apparition.

  She never moved but the bears were moved to move

  and if he could have been sure that she was dead

  he would have fled for all his love

  leaving behind him fractured vows, for he loathed bears.

  Their giant forelegs & their terrible paws

  not to mention their teeth, theirs

  Like an old sabre-tooth tiger’s famished & wild

  hurling himself upon a mastodon

  and gorging, reconciled.

  Just once, the tiger wondered to itself:

  I am their enemy, I have enemies

  almost as bad as Fr. Rolfe;

  friendship is out. How then can we administer our affairs

  in the absence of slaves & stewards, if you please,

  who may hire us for theirs.

  292

  The Irish sky is raining, the Irish winds are high,

  the Irish sun comes back & forth, and I

  in my Irish pub

  past puberty & into pub-erty

  have sent my Irish wife & child downtown,

  I lapse like an Irish clown.

  I dream, and God knows Henry’s dreams are vivid

  as the horses in Poona, lustrous on the track

  whose father will not swim back

  ruined in a grave in Oklahoma

  loveless except for Henry steept in Homer

  & Timon & livid.

  Henry, who was always a crash programme,

  smiled, and the smile was worse than the rictus of the victim,

  ‘Another drop’ said Mick.

  He put his silver down, he took back all his lies,