John Berryman
Page 18
Bound for my kindness or my lack of it
Solely to strength you crumple or you nurse
By not being or being with me. Curse
This kindness tricks her to think bit by bit
We will be more together . . better . . sit
The poor time out, and then the good rehearse—
When neither my fondness nor my pity can
O no more bend me to Eileen with love,
Gladden the sad eyes my lost eyes have seen
With such and so long ache, ah to unman.
When she calls, small, and grieving I must move,
The horror and beauty of your eyes burn between.
[84]
How shall I do, to pass the weary time
Of fading entertainments while you’re gone?
Early I’ll rise still, then from dawn to dawn
To meet you in our grove not once will climb.
Your fingers to my shoulder in some rime
I’ll manage only, and your instep drawn
In the morning light remember only; on
Any dropt cue follow you off, and mime
My senseless presence in your presence not,
My comments rather skew—They’ll say ‘I wonder
What is ín Berryman lately? I find him stranger
Than usual’—working their nickel in the slot
They’ll try again, dreamless they drag from yonder
Vexed to my leather chair this lathered ranger.
[85]
Spendthrift Urethra—Sphincter, frugal one—
Masters from darkness in your double sway
Whom favouring either all chaotic stray—
Adjust us to our love! . . Unlust undone,
Wave us together out of the running sun
Suddenly, and rapt from our shore-play,
My loss your consolation and protégé,
Down at a stroke whelmed, while the waters run.
O serious as our play, my nervous plea!
. . Hallucinatory return to the warm and real
Dark, still, happy apartment after the riot . .
Wounded, be well, and sleep sound as the sea
Vexed in wide night by no wind, but the wheel
Roils down to zero . . steady . . archaic quiet.
[86]
Our lives before hopelessly our mistake!—
We should have been together seething years,
We should have been the tomb-bat hangs and hears
Sounds inconceivable, been a new snowflake,
We should have been the senile world’s one sake,
Vestigial lovers, tropical and fierce
Among fatigues and snows, the gangs and queers,
We should have been the bloom of a cockcrow lake.
. . A child’s moon, child’s fire!—What I love of you
Inter alia tingles like a whole good day,
A hard wind, or a Strad’s consummate pluck,
Proficient, full and strong, shrewd as the blue
Profound sky, pale as a winter sky you lay
And with these breasts whiter than stars gave suck.
[87]
Is it possible, poor kids, you must not come out?
Care for you none but Chris, to whom you cry?
Here in my small book must you dance, then die?
Rain nor sun greet you first, no friendly shout?
If the army stands, moves not ahead one scout?
Sits all your army ever still, small fry?
And never to all your letters one reply?
No echo back, your games go on without?
Dignity under these conditions few
I feel might muster steadily, and you
Jitterbug more than you pavane, poor dears . .
Only you seem to want to hunt the whole
House through, scrutators of the difficult soul
Native here—and pomp’s not for pioneers.
[88]
Anomalous I linger, and ignore
My blue conviction she will now not come
Whose grey eyes blur before me like some sum
A shifting riddle to fatigue . . I pore . .
Faster they flicker, and flag, moving on slower,
And I move with them—who am I? a scum
Thickens on a victim, a delirium
Begins to mutter, which I must explore.
O rapt as Monteverdi’s ‘… note … note…’
I glide aroused—a rumour? or a dream?
An actual lover? Elmo’s light? erlking?
—‘I know very well who I am’ said Don Quixote.
The sourceless lightning laps my stare, the stream
Backs through the wood, the cosy spiders cling.
[89]
‘If long enough I sit here, she, she’ll pass.’
This fatuous, and suffering-inversion,
And Donne-mimetic, O and true assertion
Tolls through my hypnagogic mind; alas
I hang upon this threshold of plate-glass,
Dry and dull eyes, in the same weird excursion
As from myself our love-months are, some Persian
Or Aztec supersession—the land mass
Extruded first from the archaic sea,
Whereon a desiccation, and species died
Except the one somehow learnt to breathe air:
Unless my lungs adapt me to despair,
I’ll nod off into the increasing, wide,
Marvellous sleep my hopelets herald me.
[90]
For you an idyl, was it not, so far,
Flowing and inconvulsive pastoral,
I suddenly made out tonight as, all
The pallor of your face fled like a star,
It clenched and darkened in your avatar,
The goddess grounded. Lovers’ griefs appal
Women, who with their honey brook their gall
And succor, as they can, the men they mar.
Down-soft my joy in the beginning, O
Dawn-disenchanted since, I hardly remember
The useful, urine-retentive years I sped.
—I said as little as I could, sick; know
Your strange heart works; wish us into September
Only alive, and lovers, and abed.
[91]
Itself a lightning-flash ripping the ‘dark
Backward’ of you-before, you harrowed me
How you and the wild boy (larcener-to-be)
Took horses out one night, full in the stark
Pre-storm midnight blackness, for a lark,
At seventeen, drunk, and you whipt them madly
About the gulph’s rim, lightning-split, with glee
About, about. A decade: . . I embark.
How can we know with whom we ride, or soon
Or later, ever? You . . what are yóu like?
A topic’s occupied me months, month’s mind.
But I more startled may, than who shrank down
And wiped his sharp eyes with a helpless look,
The great tears falling, when Odysseus struck him, find.
[92]
What can to you this music wakes my years
(I whistle you a wistful specimen)
Become, to you affable and supple, when
The music they call music fills your ears?
How far? Alive to my animals’ tears?
Haunted by cagy sighs? Or the cries of men
Versed are you in? . . Your Tetragrammaton—
J.B., M·o, B·e, and F.S.—hears.
No quarrel here once! Pindar sang both sides,—
Two thousand years their easy marriage lasted,
Until some coldness grew . . deaf pride of art . .
Only one now to rile the other rides
Across sometimes: neither admits he’s fasted,
They stare with desire, and spar . . and crib . . and part.
[93]
The man who made her let me climb the derrick<
br />
At nine (not far from—four—another child)
Produced this steady daring keeps us wild . .
I remember the wind wound on me like a lyric.
One resignation on to more, some cleric
Has told us, helms, would make the Devil mild
At last; one boldness so in the spirit filed
Brings boldness on—collective—atmospheric—
Character in the end, contented on a slope
Brakeless, a nervy ledge . . we overgrow
My derrick into midnights and high dawn,
The riot where I’m happy—still I hope
Sometime to dine with you, sometime to go
Sober to bed, a proper citizen.
[94]
Most strange, my change, this nervous interim.—
The utter courtship ended, tokens won,
Assurance salted down . . all this to stun
More than excite: I blink about me grim
And dull and anxious, rather than I skim
Light bright & confident: like a weak pun
I stumble neither way: Hope weighs a ton:
Tired certainly, but much less tired than dim.
—I wére absence’ adept, a glaring eye;
Or I were agile to this joy, this letter,
You say from Spring Hill: ‘I am not the same.’—
No more am I: I’m neither: without you I
Am not myself. My sight is dying. Better
The searchlights’ torture which we overcame!
[95]
‘Old Smoky’ when you sing with Robin, Chris,
Sometimes at night, and your small voices hover
Mother-and-son but sourceless, O yours over
The hesitating treble must be his,
I glide about my metamorphosis
Gently, a tryst of troubled joy—discover
Our pine-grove grown a mountain—the true lover
Soft as a flower, hummingbird-piercing, is.
I saw him stretch out farther than a wish
And I have seen him gutted like a fish
At hipshot midnight for you, by your side.—
Last night there in your love-seat, you away,
I sang low to my niece your song, and stray
Still from myself into you singing slide.
[96]
It will seem strange, no more this range on range
Of opening hopes and happenings. Strange to be
One’s name no longer. Not caught up, not free.
Strange, not to wish one’s wishes onward. Strange,
The looseness, slopping, time and space estrange.
Strangest, and sad as a blind child, not to see
Ever you, never to hear you, endlessly
Neither you there, nor coming . . Heavy change!—
An instant there is, Sophoclean, true,
When Oedipus must understand: his head—
When Oedipus believes!—tilts like a wave,
And will not break, only
Wells from his dreadful mouth, the love he led:
Prolong to Procyon this. This begins my grave.
[97]
I say I laid siege—you enchanted me . .
Magic and warfare, faithful metaphors
As when their paleolithic woods and tors
The hunter and the witchwife roamed, half free,
Half to the Provider and the Mystery-
riddler bound: the kill, the spell: your languors
I wag my wolf’s tail to—without remorse?—
You shudder as I’d pierce you where I knee
I . . Only we little wished, or you to charm
Or I to make you shudder, you to wreck
Or I to hum you daring on my arm.
Abrupt as a dogfight, the air full of
Tails and teeth—the meshing of a trek—
All this began: knock-down-and-drag-out love.
[98]
Mallarmé siren upside down,—rootedly!
Dare the top crotch, the utmost two limbs plume
Cloudward, the bole swells just below . . See, from
Her all these leaves and branches! . . world-green . . free
To be herself: firm-subtle-grey-brown barky,
A skin upon her gravest thought: to roam,
Sea-disinclined . . through the round stair I come,
A hollow. Board loose down near your rooftree.
. . I biked out leisurely one day because
My heart was breaking, and swung up with the casual
Passion of May again your sycamore . .
Hand trembling on the top, everything was
Beautiful, inhuman, green and real as usual.—
Your hypocrite hangs on the truth, sea-sore.
[99]
A murmuration of the shallow, Crane
Sees us, or so, twittering at nightfall
About the eaves, coloured and houseless soul,
Before the mucksweat rising of the Wain.
No black or white here; and our given brain
Troubles us incompletely; if we call
Sometimes to one another, if we fall
Sorry, we soon forget; wing’d, but in vain.
He fell in love once, when upon her arms
He concentrated what I call his faith . .
He died, and dropt into a German hole,
A generation or our culture’s swarms
Accumulated honey for your wraith—
Does his wraith watch?—ash-blond and candid soul!
[100]
I am interested alone in making ready,
Pointed, more splendid, O the Action which
Attends your whim; bridge interim; enrich
That unimaginable-still, with study
So sharp at time the probe shivers back bloody;
Test the strange circuit but to trust the switch.
The Muse is real, the random shades I stitch—
Devoted vicarage—somewhere real, and steady.
Burnt cork, my leer, my Groucho crouch and rush,
No more my nature than Cyrano’s: we
Are ‘hindered characters’ and mock the time,
The curving and incomprehensible hush
Einstein requires before that colloquy
Altared of joy concludes our pantomime!
[101]
Because I’d seen you not believe your lover,
Because you scouted cries come from no cliff,
Because to supplications you were stiff
As Ciro, O as Nero to discover
Slow how your subject loved you, I would hover
Between the slave and rebel—till this life
Arrives: ‘… was astonished as I would be if
I leaned against a house and the house fell over…’
Well, it fell over, over: trust him now:
A stronger house than looked—you leaned, and crash,
My walls and ceiling were to be walked on.—
The same thing happened once in Chaplin, how
He solved it now I lose.—Walk on the trash . .
Walk softly, triste,—little is really gone.
[102]
A penny, pity, for the runaway ass!
A nickel for the killer’s twenty-six-mile ride!
Ice for the root rut-smouldering inside!
—Eight hundred weeks I have not run to Mass.—
Toss Jack a jawful of good August grass!
‘Soul awful’, pray for a soul sometimes has cried!
Wire reasons he seasons should still abide!
—Hide all your arms where he is bound to pass.—
Who drew me first aside? her I forgive,
Or him, as I would be forgotten by
O be forgiven for salt bites I took.
Who drew me off last, willy-nilly, live
On (darling) free. If we meet, know me by
Your own exempt (I pray) and earthly look.
[103]
A ‘brok
en heart’ . . but can a heart break, now?
Lovers have stood bareheaded in love’s ‘storm’
Three thousand years, changed by their mistress’ ‘charm’,
Fitted their ‘torment’ to a passive bow,
Suffered the ‘darts’ under a knitted brow,
And has one heart broken for all this ‘harm’?
An arm is something definite. My arm
Is acting—I hardly know to tell you how.
It aches . . well, after fifteen minutes of
Serving, I can’t serve more, it’s not my arm,
A piece of pain joined to me, helpless dumb thing.
After four months of work-destroying love
(An hour, I still don’t lift it: I feel real alarm:
Weeks of this,—no doctor finds a thing),
not much; and not all. Still, this is something.
[104]
A spot of poontang on a five-foot piece,
Diminutive, but room enough . . like clay
To finger eager on some torrid day . .
Who’d throw her black hair back, and hang, and tease.
Never, not once in all one’s horny lease
To’have had a demi-lay, a pretty, gay,
Snug, slim and supple-breasted girl for play . .
She bats her big, warm eyes, and slides like grease.
And cuff her silly-hot again, mouth hot
And wet her small round writhing—but this screams
Suddenly awake, unreal as alkahest,
My god, this isn’t what I want!—You tot
The harrow-days you hold me to, black dreams,
The dirty water to get off my chest.
[105]
Three, almost, now into the ass’s years,
When hard on burden burden galls my back,
I carry corn feeds others, only crack
Cudgels, kicks on me, mountainous arrears
Worsen—avulse my fiery shirt!—The spheres
May sing with pain, I grieve knee-down, I slack
Deeper in evil . . love’s demoniac
Jerquer, who frisked me, hops aside and jeers.
The dog’s, and monkey’s years—pot’s residue,