If time’s map bore the brat of time intact?
Odysseys I examine, bed on a board,
Heartbreak familiar as the heart is strange.
In the city of the stranger I discovered
Strike and corruption: cars reared on the bench
To horn their justice at the citizen’s head
And hallow the citizen deaf, half-dead.
The quiet man from his own window saw
Insane wind take the ash, his favourite branch
Wrench, crack; the hawk came down, the raven hovered.
Slow spent stars wheel and dwindle where I fell.
Physicians are a constellation where
The blown brain sits a fascist to the heart.
Late, it is late, and it is time to start.
Sanction the civic woe, deal with your dear,
Convince the stranger: none of us is well.
We must travel in the direction of our fear.
II
By what weird ways, Mather and Boone, we came.
Ethan Allen, father, in the rebel wood
Teach trust and disobedience to the son
Who neither obeys nor can disobey One
No longer, down the reaches of his longing, known.
Speak from the forest and declare my blood
Dishonour, a trick a mockery my name.
You, Shaver, other shade, rébel again,
Great-grandfather, attest my hopeless need
Amongst the chromium luxury of the age
Uncomfortable, threadbare, apt to rage.
Recall your office, exile; tell me now
To devour the annals of the valuable dead,
Fish for the cortex, candour for my pain.
Horizons perish from a hacking eye! . .
The Hero, haggard on the top of time,
Enacts his inconceivable woe and pride
Plunging his enemies down the mountainside,
Lesson and master. We are come to learn
Compassion from the last and piercing scream
Of who was lifted before he could die.
Animal-and-Hero, where you lounge the air
Is the air of summer, smooth and masculine
As skin over a muscle; but the day
Darkens, and it is time to move away.
Old friends unbolt the night wherein you roam;
Wind rises, lightning, rain beats, you begin
The climb the conflict that are your desire.
In storm and gloom, before it is too late
I make my testament. I bequeath my heart
To the disillusioned few who have wished me well;
My vision I leave to one who has the will
To master it, and the consuming art;
What else—the sorrow, the disease, the hate—
I scatter; and I am prepared to start.
III
What is the age of naked man? His time
Scrawls the engrossing tumult on green mould
In a cellar and disreputable place.
Consternation and Hope war in his face.
Writhing upon his bed who achieves sleep
Who is alone? Man in the cradle, old,
Rocks on the fiery earth, smoke is his fame.
Prophecy is another smoke, and lost.
To say that country, time to come, will be
The island or harbour city of our choice
Argues the sick will raving in the voice.
The pythoness is mute upon her bier,
Cassandra took a thrust she would not see
And dropt for daughter an inarticulate ghost.
The animal within the animal
How shall we satisfy? With toys its fear,
With incantation its adorable trust?
Shall we say ‘We were once and we shall be dust’
Or nourish it with confident lies and look
Contentment? What can the animal bear?
Whose version brightens that will not appal?
Watch in the valleys for the sign of snow.
Watch the light. Where the riotous leaves lay
Will arise a winter man at the New Year
And speak. No eye will be dry, none shall fear.
—That time is not yet, and our eyes are now:
Twenty-five is a time to move away.
Late on the perilous wood the son flies low.
The projection of the tower on the pine
Wavers. The wind will fan and force the fire
Streaming across our ditches to find wood.
All that someone has wished or understood
Is fuel to the holocaust he lives;
It spreads, it is the famine of his desire,
The tongue teeth eyes of your will and of mine.
What then to praise, what love, what look to have?
The animals who lightless live, alone
And dark die. We await the rising moon.
When the moon lifts, lagging winter moon,
Its white face over time where the sun shone
Gold once, we have a work to do, a grave
At last for the honourable and exhausted man.
Detroit, 1940
The Traveller
They pointed me out on the highway, and they said
‘That man has a curious way of holding his head.’
They pointed me out on the beach; they said ‘That man
Will never become as we are, try as he can.’
They pointed me out at the station, and the guard
Looked at me twice, thrice, thoughtfully & hard.
I took the same train that the others took,
To the same place. Were it not for that look
And those words, we were all of us the same.
I studied merely maps. I tried to name
The effects of motion on the travellers,
I watched the couple I could see, the curse
And blessings of that couple, their destination,
The deception practised on them at the station,
Their courage. When the train stopped and they knew
The end of their journey, I descended too.
The Ball Poem
What is the boy now, who has lost his ball,
What, what is he to do? I saw it go
Merrily bouncing, down the street, and then
Merrily over—there it is in the water!
No use to say ‘O there are other balls’:
An ultimate shaking grief fixes the boy
As he stands rigid, trembling, staring down
All his young days into the harbour where
His ball went. I would not intrude on him,
A dime, another ball, is worthless. Now
He senses first responsibility
In a world of possessions. People will take balls,
Balls will be lost always, little boy,
And no one buys a ball back. Money is external.
He is learning, well behind his desperate eyes,
The epistemology of loss, how to stand up
Knowing what every man must one day know
And most know many days, how to stand up
And gradually light returns to the street,
A whistle blows, the ball is out of sight,
Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark
Floor of the harbour . . I am everywhere,
I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move
With all that move me, under the water
Or whistling, I am not a little boy.
Fare Well
Motions of waking trouble winter air,
I wonder, and his face as it were forms
Solemn, canorous, under the howled alarms,—
The eyes shadowed and shut.
Certainly for this sort of thing it is very late,
I shudder, while my love longs and I pour
My bright eyes towards the moving shadow . . where?
Out, like a plucked gut.
What has been taken away will not return,
I take it, whether upon the crouch of night
Or for my mountain need to share a morning’s light,—
No! I am alone.
What has been taken away should not have been shown,
I complain, torturing, and then withdrawn.
After so long, can I still long so and burn,
Imperishable son?
O easy the phoenix in the tree of the heart,
Each in its time, his twigs and spices fixes
To make a last nest, and marvellously relaxes,—
Out of the fire, weak peep! . .
Father I fought for Mother, sleep where you sleep!
I slip into a snowbed with no hurt
Where warm will warm be warm enough to part
Us. As I sink, I weep.
II
The Spinning Heart
The fireflies and the stars our only light,
We rock, watching between the roses night
If we could see the roses. We cannot.
Where do the fireflies go by day, what eat?
What categories shall we use tonight?
The day was an exasperating day,
The day in history must hang its head
For the foul letters many women got,
Appointments missed, men dishevelled and sad
Before their mirrors trying to be proud.
But now (we say) the sweetness of the night
Will hide our imperfections from our sight,
For nothing can be angry or astray,
No man unpopular, lonely, or beset,
Where half a yellow moon hangs from a cloud.
Spinning however and balled up in space
All hearts, desires, pewter and honeysuckle,
What can be known of the individual face?
To the continual drum-beat of the blood
Mesh sea and mountain recollection, flame,
Motives in the corridor, touch by night,
Violent touch, and violence in rooms;
How shall we reconcile in any light
This blow and the relations that it wrecked?
Crescent the pressures on the singular act
Freeze it at last into its season, place,
Until the flood and disorder of Spring.
To Easterfield the court’s best bore, defining
Space tied into a sailor’s reef, our praise:
He too is useful, he is part of this,
Inimitable, tangible, post-human,
And Theo’s disappointment has a place,
An item in that metamorphosis
The horrible coquetry of aging women.
Our superstitions barnacle our eyes
To the tide, the coming good; or has it come?—
Insufficient upon the beaches of the world
To drown that complex and that bestial drum.
Triumphant animals,—upon the rest
Bearing down hard, brooding, come to announce
The causes and directions of all this
Biting and breeding,—how will all your sons
Discover what you, assisted or alone,
Staring and sweating for seventy years,
Could never discover, the thing itself?
Your fears,
Fidelity, and dandelions grown
As big as elephants, your morning lust
Can neither name nor control. No time for shame,
Whippoorwill calling, excrement falling, time
Rushes like a madman forward. Nothing can be known.
On the London Train
Despite the lonesome look
The man in the corner has,
Across the compartment,
Doubtless a dozen daze
Daily their eyes on him intent
And fancy him beside a brook,
Their arms with his laced,
Holding him fast.
Whilst he for some virgin
Endures the vacant night
Without rest, and would go
On bare knees, eyes shut tight,
To Tomsk or San Diego
If she’d but let him in,
Bind his hurt knees, or say
‘There is a doctor down the way.’
So it is and has been . .
Summon an old lover’s ghost,
He’ll swear no man has lied
Who spoke of the painful and most
Embarrassing ordeal this side
Satisfaction,—while the green
Difficulties later are
More than Zeus could bear.
Austere in a sheltered place
The sea-shell puzzles Destiny,
Who set us, man and beast
And bird, in extremity
To love and twig a nest.
The frown on the great face
Is recompense too little for
Who suffer on the shore.
Caravan
The lady in her silver-
grey spectacular
Dressing-room prepares,
Twisting at the mirror,
Of son and daughter the careers.
Also in the evening
He who collects dung
Conjures an August moon
Where he may once bring
Her flushed and salt, supine.
The blue vase having final
Wit glitters fragile
Until at the horizon
To sky and sea all
Divides, throwing off season.
Thus kept delicately
In appalling storm the
Buds will begin again
Their white difficulty
To the mature and green.
Waves, guilt, all winter tears
Draw tingling nearer
And hang a glass for apparition . .
As the words here are
At work upon salvation.
The Possessed
This afternoon, discomfortable dead
Drift into doorways, lounge, across the bridge,
Whittling memory at the water’s edge,
And watch. This is what you inherited.
Random they are, but hairy, for they chafe
All in their eye, enlarging like a slide;
Spectral as men once met or crucified,
And kind. Until the sun sets you are safe.
A prey to your most awkward reflection,
Loose-limbed before the fire you sit appalled.
And think that by your error you have called
These to you. Look! the light will soon be gone.
Excited see from the window the men fade
In the twilight; reappear two doors down.
Suppose them well acquainted with the town
Who built it. Do you fumble in the shade?
The key was lost, remember, yesterday,
Or stolen,—undergraduates perhaps;
But all men are their colleagues, and eclipse
Very like dusk. It is too late to pray.
There was a time crepuscular was mild,
The hour for tea, acquaintances, and fall
Away of all day’s difficulties, all
Discouragement. Weep, you are not a child.
The equine hour rears, no further friend,
Intolerant, foam-lathered, pregnant with
Mysterious grave watchers in their wrath
Let into tired Troy. You are near the end.
Midsummer Common loses its last gold,
And grey is there. The sun slants down behind
A certain cinema, and the world is blind
But more dangerous. It is growing cold.
Light all the lights, heap wood upon the fire
To banish shadow. Draw the curtains tight.
But sightless eyes will lean through, and wide night
Darken this room of yours. As you desire.
Think on your sins with all intensity.
The men are o
n the stair, they will not wait.
There is a paper-knife to penetrate
Heart & guilt together. Do it quickly.
Parting as Descent
The sun rushed up the sky; the taxi flew;
There was a kind of fever on the clock
That morning. We arrived at Waterloo
With time to spare and couldn’t find my track.
The bitter coffee in a small café
Gave us our conversation. When the train
Began to move, I saw you turn away
And vanish, and the vessels in my brain
Burst, the train roared, the other travellers
In flames leapt, burning on the tilted air
Che si cruccia, I heard the devils curse
And shriek with joy in that place beyond prayer.
Cloud and Flame
The summer cloud in summer blue
Capricious from the wind will run,
Laughing into the tender sun,
Knowing the work that it must do.
When One says liberty is vain
The cloud will come to summer rain.
After his college failure, Swift
Eight hours a day against his age
Began to document his rage
Towards the decades of strife and shift.
From claims that pride or party made
He kept in an exacting shade.
Cornford in a retreat was lost;
A stray shot like an aimless joke
His learning, spirit, at one stroke
Dispersed, his generation’s cost.
The harvest value of his head
Is less than cloud, is less than bread.
The One recalls the many burn,
Prepared or unprepared: one flame
Within a shade can strike its name,
Another sees the cloud return.
And Thirkill saw the Christ’s head shake
At Hastings, by the Bloody Lake.
Letter to His Brother
The night is on these hills, and some can sleep.
Some stare into the dark, some walk.
Only the sound of glasses and of talk,
Of cracking logs, and of a few who weep,
Comes on the night wind to my waking ears.
Your enemies and mine are still,
None works upon us either good or ill:
Mint by the stream, tree-frogs, are travellers.
What shall I say for anniversary?
At Dachau rubber blows forbid
And Becket’s brains upon the pavement spread
Forbid my trust, my hopeful prophecy.
Prediction if I make, I violate
The just expectancy of youth,—
John Berryman Page 9