Growling and toothless, giggling, grimacing—
I hope to miss. Who in my child could see
The adulter and bizarre of thirty-two?—
But I will seem more silent soon . . mire-king.
Time, time that damns, disvexes. Unman me.
[106]
Began with swirling, blind, unstilled oh still,—
The tide had set in toward the western door
And I was working with the tide, I bore
My panful of reflexion firm, until
A voice arrested me,—body, and will,
And panful, wheeled and spilt, tempted nerves tore,
And all uncome time blackened like the core
Of an apple on through man’s heart moving still . .
At nine o’clock and thirty Thursday night,
In Nineteen Forty-seven, February
Twice-ten-day, by a doorway in McCosh,
So quietly neither the rip’s cold slosh
Nor the meshing of great wheels warned me, unwary,
An enigmatic girl smiled out my sight.
[107]
Darling I wait O in my upstairs box
O for your footfall, O for your footfáll
in the extreme heat—I don’t mind at all,
it’s silence has me and the movement of clocks
keeping us isolated longer: rocks
did the first martyr and will do to stall
our enemies, I’ll get up on the roof of the hall
and heave freely. The University of Soft Knocks
will headlines in the Times make: Fellow goes mad,
crowd panics, rhododendrons injured. Slow
will flow the obituaries while the facts get straight,
almost straight. He was in love and he was had.
That was it: he should have stuck to his own mate,
before he went a-conning across the sea-O.
[108]
I owe you, do I not, a roofer: though
My sister-in-law and her nephews stayed,
Not I stayed. O kind sister-outlaw, laid
Far off and legally four weeks, stoop low,
For my true thanks are fugitive also
Only to you;—stop off your cant, you jade,
Bend down,—I have not ever disobeyed
You; and you will hear what it is I owe.
I owe you thanks for evenings in your house
When . . neither here, nor there, nowhere, were you,
Nights like long knives; . . two letters! . . life like a mouse
Cheeseless, but trapt. Another debit to
Your kinder husband. From the country of Choice
Another province chopt,—and they were few.
[109]
Ménage à trois, like Tristan’s,—difficult! . .
The convalescent Count; his mistress; fast
The wiry wild arthritic young fantast
In love with her, his genius occult,
His weakness blazing, ugly, an insult
A salutation; in his yacht they assed
Up and down the whole coast six months . . last
It couldn’t: . . the pair to Paris. Chaos, result.
Well—but four worse!! . . all four, marvellous friends—
Some horse-shit here, eh?—You admitted it,
Come, you did once . . and we are friends, I say.—
‘La Cuchiani aima Tristan, mais…’
(The biographer says) unscrupulous a bit,
Or utterly . . There, of course, the resemblance ends.
[110]
‘Ring us up when you want to see us…’—‘Sure’,
Said Moses to the SS woman, smil-
ing hopeless Moses.—Put her whip and file
Away and walked away, strip-murderer,
A svelte Chris, whistling . . Knowing, it’s all your
(Alas) initiation: you I can’t: while
We are relationless, ‘us’?—Hail, chat: cant, heil!—
Hypocrite-perfect! hoping I endure.
A winter-shore is forming in my eye,
The widest river: down to it we dash,
In love, but I am naked, and shake; so,
Uncoloured-thick-oil clad, you nod and cry
‘Let’s go!’ . . white fuzzless limbs you razor flash,
And I am to follow the way you go.
27 August
[111]
Christian to Try: ‘I am so coxed in it,
All I can do is pull, pull without shame,
Backwards,—on the coxswain fall the fiery blame,
I slump free and exhausted.’—‘Stop a bit,’
Try studied his sloe gin, ‘if you must fit
A trope so, you must hope to quit the game’
Pursued my brown friend with the plausible name
‘Before your heart enlarging mucks you. Minute
By minute you pull faster.’—But I too
Am named, though lost . . you learn God’s will, give in,
After, and whatever, you sit on, you sit.
Try ‘Quit’ said ‘and be free.’ I freeze to you
And I am free now of the fire of this sin
I choose . . I lose, yes . . but then I submit!
[112]
I break my pace now for a sonic boom,
the future’s with & in us. I sit fired
but comes on strong with the fire fatigue: I’m tired.
‘I’d drive my car across the living-room
if I could get it inside the house.’ You loom
less, less than before when your voice choired
into my transept hear I now it, not expired
but half-dead with exhaustion, like Mr Bloom.
Dazzle, before I abandon you, my eyes,
my eyes which I need for journeys difficult
in which case it may be said that I survive you.
Your voice continues, with its lows & highs,
and I am a willing accomplice in the cult
and every word that I have gasped of you is true.
[113]
‘I didn’t see anyone else, I just saw Lies’
Anne Frank remorseful from the grave: ah well,
it was a vision of her mother in Hell,
a payment beforehand for rebellion’s seize,
whereby she grew up: springing from her knees
she saw her parents level. I ward your spell
away, and I try hard to look at you level
but that is quite unaccustomed to me, Lise.
Months I lookt up, entranced by you up there
like a Goya ceiling which will not come down,
in swirling clouds, until the end is here.
Tetélestai. We steamed in a freighter from Spain
& I will never see those frescoes again
nor need to, having memorized your cloudy gown.
[114]
You come blonde visiting through the black air
knocking on my hinged lawn-level window
and you will come for years, above, below,
& through to interrupt my study where
I’m sweating it out like asterisks: so there,—
you are the text, my work’s broken down so
I found, after my grandmother died, slow,
and I had flown far South to her funeral spare
but crowded with relations, I found her last
letter unopened, much less answered: shame
overcame me so far I paused & cried
in my underground study, for all the past
undone & never again to walk tall, lame
at the mercy of your presence to abide.
[115]
As usual I’m up before the sun
begins to warm this intolerable place
and I have stared all night upon your face
but am not wiser thereby. Everyone
rattles his weakness or his thing undone,
I shake you like a rat. Open disgrace
&n
bsp; yawns all before me: have I left a trace,
a spoor? Clouding it over, I look for my gun.
She’s hidden it. I won’t sing on of that.
Whiskey is bracing. Failures are my speed,
I thrive on ends, the dog is at the door
in heat, the neighbourhood is male except one cat
and they thresh on my stoop. Prevent my need,
Someone, and come & find me on the floor.
[116]
Outlaws claw mostly to a riddled end,
the close of their stories known. The cause of our story
which led us up from Hell to Purgatory,
then again downwards, has been fully penned
and stands mysterious: what lawyer will defend
there hopeless lovers with their eyes set on glory
for whom one tryst a week is satisfactory
but we can’t have that, merely. Shall I let it depend
on the weather & her moods, my waking up,
my cycling speed? or let it all go smash
in a welter of despair & suicides?
I stand off. I will the matter to a stop.
After the brightness, on Monday night the trash.
I am a savant of the problem on both sides.
[117]
All we were going strong last night this time,
the mots were flying & the frozen daiquiris
were downing, supine on the floor lay Lise
listening to Schubert grievous & sublime,
my head was frantic with a following rime:
it was a good evening, an evening to please,
I kissed her in the kitchen—ecstasies—
among so much good we tamped down the crime.
The weather’s changing. This morning was cold,
as I made for the grove, without expectation,
some hundred Sonnets in my pocket, old,
to read her if she came. Presently the sun
yellowed the pines & my lady came not
in blue jeans & a sweater. I sat down & wrote.
* * *
Judges xvi.22
* * *
HOMAGE TO MISTRESS BRADSTREET
[1953]
[Born 1612 Anne Dudley, married at 16 Simon Bradstreet, a Cambridge man, steward to the Countess of Warwick & protégé of her father Thomas Dudley secretary to the Earl of Lincoln. Crossed in the Arbella, 1630, under Governor Winthrop.]
[1]
The Governor your husband lived so long
moved you not, restless, waiting for him? Still,
you were a patient woman.—
I seem to see you pause here still:
Sylvester, Quarles, in moments odd you pored
before a fire at, bright eyes on the Lord,
all the children still.
‘Simon…’ Simon will listen while you read a Song.
[2]
Outside the New World winters in grand dark
white air lashing high thro’ the virgin stands
foxes down foxholes sigh,
surely the English heart quails, stunned.
I doubt if Simon than this blast, that sea,
spares from his rigour for your poetry
more. We are on each other’s hands
who care. Both of our worlds unhanded us. Lie stark,
[3]
thy eyes look to me mild. Out of maize & air
your body’s made, and moves. I summon, see,
from the centuries it.
I think you won’t stay. How do we
linger, diminished, in our lovers’ air,
implausibly visible, to whom, a year,
years, over interims; or not;
to a long stranger; or not; shimmer & disappear.
[4]
Jaw-ript, rot with its wisdom, rending then;
then not. When the mouth dies, who misses you?
Your master never died,
Simon ah thirty years past you—
Pockmarkt & westward staring on a haggard deck
it seems I find you, young. I come to check,
I come to stay with you,
and the Governor, & Father, & Simon, & the huddled men.
[5]
By the week we landed we were, most, used up.
Strange ships across us, after a fortnight’s winds
unfavouring, frightened us;
bone-sad cold, sleet, scurvy; so were ill
many as one day we could have no sermons;
broils, quelled; a fatherless child unkennelled; vermin
crowding & waiting: waiting.
And the day itself he leapt ashore young Henry Winthrop
[6]
(delivered from the waves; because he found
off their wigwams, sharp-eyed, a lone canoe
across a tidal river,
that water glittered fair & blue
& narrow, none of the other men could swim
and the plantation’s prime theft up to him,
shouldered on a glad day
hard on the glorious feasting of thanksgiving) drowned.
[7]
How long with nothing in the ruinous heat,
clams & acorns stomaching, distinction perishing,
at which my heart rose,
with brackish water, we would sing.
When whispers knew the Governor’s last bread
was browning in his oven, we were discourag’d.
The Lady Arbella dying—
dyings—at which my heart rose, but I did submit.
[8]
That beyond the Atlantic wound our woes enlarge
is hard, hard that starvation burnishes our fear,
but I do gloss for You.
Strangers & pilgrims fare we here,
declaring we seek a City. Shall we be deceived?
I know whom I have trusted, & whom I have believed,
and that he is able to
keep that I have committed to his charge.
[9]
Winter than summer worse, that first, like a file
on a quick, or the poison suck of a thrilled tooth;
and still we may unpack.
Wolves & storms among, uncouth
board-pieces, boxes, barrels vanish, grow
houses, rise. Motes that hop in sunlight slow
indoors, and I am Ruth
away: open my mouth, my eyes wet: I wóuld smile:
[10]
vellum I palm, and dream. Their forest dies
to greensward, privets, elms & towers, whence
a nightingale is throbbing.
Women sleep sound. I was happy once . .
(Something keeps on not happening; I shrink?)
These minutes all their passions & powers sink
and I am not one chance
for an unknown cry or a flicker of unknown eyes.
[11]
Chapped souls ours, by the day Spring’s strong winds swelled,
Jack’s pulpits arched, more glad. The shawl I pinned
flaps like a shooting soul
might in such weather Heaven send.
Succumbing half, in spirit, to a salmon sash
I prod the nerveless novel succotash—
I must be disciplined,
in arms, against that one, and our dissidents, and myself.
[12]
Versing, I shroud among the dynasties;
quaternion on quaternion, tireless I phrase
anything past, dead, far,
sacred, for a barbarous place.
—To please your wintry father? all this bald
abstract didactic rime I read appalled
harassed for your fame
mistress neither of fiery nor velvet verse, on your knees
[13]
hopeful & shamefast, chaste, laborious, odd,
whom the sea tore. —The damned roar with loss,
so they hug & are mean
with themselves, and I cannot be thus.
after what must not be? I lie wrong
once more. For at fourteen
I found my heart more carnal and sitting loose from God,
[14]
vanity & the follies of youth took hold of me;
then the pox blasted, when the Lord returned.
That year for my sorry face
so-much-older Simon burned,
so Father smiled, with love. Their will be done.
He to me ill lingeringly, learning to shun
a bliss, a lightning blood
vouchsafed, what did seem life. I kissed his Mystery.
[15]
Drydust in God’s eye the aquavivid skin
of Simon snoring lit with fountaining dawn
when my eyes unlid, sad.
John Cotton shines on Boston’s sin—
I ám drawn, in pieties that seem
the weary drizzle of an unremembered dream.
Women have gone mad
at twenty-one. Ambition mines, atrocious, in.
[16]
Food endless, people few, all to be done.
As pippins roast, the question of the wolves
turns & turns.
Fangs of a wolf will keep, the neck
round of a child, that child brave. I remember who
in meeting smiled & was punisht, and I know who
whispered & was stockt.
We lead a thoughtful life. But Boston’s cage we shun.
[17]
The winters close, Springs open, no child stirs
under my withering heart, O seasoned heart
God grudged his aid.
All things else soil like a shirt.
Simon is much away. My executive stales.
The town came through for the cartway by the pales,
but my patience is short.
I revolt from, I am like, these savage foresters
[18]
whose passionless dicker in the shade, whose glance
impassive & scant, belie their murderous cries
when quarry seems to show.
Again I must have been wrong, twice.
Unwell in a new way. Can that begin?
God brandishes. O love, O I love. Kin,
gather. My world is strange
and merciful, ingrown months, blessing a swelling trance.
[19]
So squeezed, wince you I scream? I love you & hate
John Berryman Page 19