together with your temper, evil already,
‘some person of bad character, churlish & eccentric’
For refusing to scribble a word of introduction:
‘He is an unlicked bear’—almost Sam Johnson.
24
An entertainer, a Molière, in the onset
under too nearly Mozart’s aegis,
the mysteries of Oedipus old were not beyond you.
Islands of suffering & disenchantment & enchantment.
25
But the brother charged the dying brother board & lodging.
Bedbugs biting, stench, unquenchable thirst,
ungovernable swelling. Then the great Malfatti
gave up on, and accorded frozen punch ad lib.
26
Your body-filth flowed on to the middle of the floor
‘I shall, no doubt, soon be going above’
sweat beading you, gasping of Shakespeare,
knocking over the picture of Haydn’s birthplace.
27
They said you died. ‘20,000 persons of every class’
clashed at the gates of the house of mourning, till they locked t
Franz Schubert stalked the five hundred feet to the church.
It’s a lie! You’re all over my wall!
You march and chant around here! I hear your thighs.
Your Birthday in Wisconsin You Are 140
‘One of the wits of the school’ your chum would say—
Hot diggity!— What the hell went wrong for you,
Miss Emily,—besides the ‘pure & terrible’ Congressman
your paralyzing papa,—and Mr Humphrey’s dying
& Benjamin’s (the other reader)? . .
Fantastic at 32 outpour, uproar, ‘terror
since September, I could tell to none’
after your ‘Master’ moved his family West
and timidly to Mr Higginson:
‘say if my verse is alive.’
Now you wore only white, now you did not appear,
till frantic 50 when you hurled your heart
down before Otis, who would none of it
thro’ five years for ‘Squire Dickinson’s cracked daughter’
awful by months, by hours . .
Well. Thursday afternoon, I’m in W———
drinking your ditties, and (dear) they are alive,—
more so than (bless her) Mrs F who teaches
farmers’ red daughters & their beaux my ditties
and yours & yours & yours!
Hot diggity!
Drugs Alcohol Little Sister
(1887–1914)
When I peered out, he had nine nights to spare
after his gun was man-handled from him
while the dying in his care
mountained and the weakened mind gave way.
So far off to my flatland flew no moan
who’d fail to focus yet for silly weeks.
I shoot him, though, a fellow agony
then I could hardly coo now I must speak
(back from this schwartze Verwesung whose white arms
lean subtle over ivories & blacks
and I am sweating, her blind scent subdues
ordure & the hiss of souls escaping)
for let us not all together in such pain
dumb apart pale into oblivion—no!
Trakl, con the male nurse.
Surmounted by carrion, cry out and overdose & go.
In Memoriam (1914–1953)
I
Took my leave (last) five times before the end
and even past these precautions lost the end.
Oh, I was highlone in the corridor
fifteen feet from his bed
where no other hovered, nurse or staff or friend,
and only the terrible breathing ever took place,
but trembling nearer after some small time
I came on the tent collapsed
and silence—O unable to say when.
I stopped panicked a nurse, she a doctor
in twenty seconds, he pulled the plasticine,
bent over, and shook his head at me.
Tubes all over, useless versus coma,
on the third day his principal physician
told me to pray he’d die, brain damage such.
His bare stub feet stuck out.
II
So much for the age’s prodigy, born one day
before I surfaced—when this fact emerged
Dylan grew stuffy and would puff all up
rearing his head back and roar
‘A little more—more—respect there, Berryman!’
Ah he had thát,—so far ahead of me,
I half-adored him for his intricate booms & indecent tales
almost entirely untrue.
Scorn bottomless for elders: we were twenty-three
but Yeats I worshipped: he was amused by this,
all day the day set for my tea with the Great Man
he plotted to turn me up drunk.
Downing me daily at shove-ha’penny
with English on the thing. C—— would slump there
plump as a lump for hours, my word how that changed!
Hard on her widowhood—
III
Apart a dozen years, sober in Seattle
‘After many a summer’ he intoned
putting out a fat hand. We shook hands.
How very shook to see him.
His talk, one told me, clung latterly to Eden,
again & again of the Garden & the Garden’s flowers,
not ever the Creator, only of that creation
with a radiant will to go there.
I have sat hard for twenty years on this
mid potpals’ yapping, and O I sit still still
though I quit crying that same afternoon
of the winter of his going.
Scribbled me once, it’s around somewhere or other,
word of their ‘Edna Millay cottage’ at Laugharne
saying come down to and disarm a while
and down a many few.
O down a many few, old friend,
and down a many few.
III
Gislebertus’ Eve
Most men are not wicked.… They
are sleep-walkers, not evildoers.
K A F K A T O G J A N O U C H
Eve & her envy roving slammed me down
prone in discrepancy: I can’t get things right:
the passion for secrets the passion worst of all,
the ultimate human, from Leonardo & Darwin
to the austere Viennese with the cigar
and Bohr a-musing: ‘The opposite of a true
statement is a false statement. But the opposite
of a profound truth may be another profound truth.’
So now we see where we are, which is all-over
we’re nowhere, son, and suffering we know it,
rapt in delusion, where weird particles
frantic & Ditheletic orbit our
revolutionary natures. She snaked out a soft
small willing hand, curved her ivory fingers on
a new taste sensation, in reverie over
something other,
sank her teeth in, and offered him a bite.
I too find it delicious.
Scholars at the Orchid Pavilion
1
Sozzled, Mo-tsu, after a silence, vouchsafed
a word alarming: ‘We must love them all!’
Affronted, the fathers jumped.
‘Yes’ he went madly on and waved in quest
of his own dreadful subject ‘O the fathers’
he cried ‘must not be all!’
Whereat upon consent we broke up for the day.
2
The bamboo’s bending power formed our theme
next dawn, under a splendid wind. The water
flapped to our tender gaze.
Girls came & crouched with tea. Great Wu pinched one,
forgetting his later nature. How the wind howled,
tranquil was our pavilion,
watching & reflecting, fingering bamboo.
3
‘Wild geese & bamboo’ muttered Ch’en Hung-shou
‘block out our boundaries of fearful wind.
Neither requires shelter.
I shelter among painters, doing bamboo.
The young shoots unaffected by the wind
mock our love for their elders.’
Mo-tsu opened his mouth & closed it to again.
4
‘The bamboo of the Ten Halls,’ went on Ch’en
‘of my time, are excellently made.
I cannot find so well
ensorcelled those of later or former time.
Let us apply the highest praise, pure wind,
to those surpassing masters;—
having done things, a thing, along that line myself.’
Tampa Stomp
The first signs of the death of the boom came in the summer,
early, and everything went like snow in the sun.
Out of their office windows. There was miasma,
a weight beyond enduring, the city reeked of failure.
The eerie, faraway scream of a Florida panther,
gu-roomp of a bull-frog. One broker we knew
drunk-driving down from Tarpon Springs flew free
when it spiralled over & was dead without one mark on him.
The Lord fled that forlorn peninsula
of fine sunlight and millions of fishes & moccasins
& Spanish moss & the Cuban bit my father
bedded & would abandon Mother for.
Ah, an antiquity, a chatter of ghosts.
Half the fish now in half the time
since those blue days died. We’re running out
of time & fathers, sore, artless about it.
Old Man Goes South Again Alone
O parakeets & avocets, O immortelles
& ibis, scarlet under that stunning sun,
deliciously & tired I come
toward you in orbit, Trinidad!—albeit without the one
I would bring with me to those isles & seas,
leaving her airborne westward thro’ great snows
whilst I lapse on your beaches
sandy with dancing, dark moist eyes among my toes.
The Handshake, The Entrance
‘You’ve got to cross that lonesome valley’ and
‘You’ve got to cross it by yourself.’
‘Ain’t no one gwine cross it for you,
You’ve got to cross it by yourself.’
Some say John was a baptist, some say John was a Jew,
some say John was just a natural man
addin’ he’s a preacher too?
‘You’ve got to cross that lonesome valley,’
Friends & lovers, link you and depart.
This one is strictly for me.
I shod myself & said goodbye to Sally
Murmurs of other farewells half broke my heart
I set out sore indeed.
The High King failed to blossom on my enterprise.
Solely the wonderful sun shone down like lead.
Through the ridges I endured,
down in no simple valley I opened my eyes,
with my strong walk down in the vales & dealt with death.
I increased my stride, cured.
Lines to Mr Frost
Felled in my tracks by your tremendous horse
slain in its tracks by the angel of good God,
I wonder toward your marvellous tall art
warning away maybe in that same morning
you squandered afternoon of your great age
on my good gravid wife & me, with tales
gay of your cunning & colossal fame
& awful character, and—Christ—I see
I know & can do nothing, and don’t mind—
you’re talking about American power and how
somehow we’ve got to be got to give it up—
so help me, in my poverty-stricken way
I said the same goddamn thing yesterday
to my thirty kids, so I was almost ready
to hear you from the grave with these passionate grave
last words, and frankly Sir you fill me with joy.
He Resigns
Age, and the deaths, and the ghosts.
Her having gone away
in spirit from me. Hosts
of regrets come & find me empty.
I don’t feel this will change.
I don’t want any thing
or person, familiar or strange.
I don’t think I will sing
any more just now;
ever. I must start
to sit with a blind brow
above an empty heart.
No
She says: Seek help! Ha-ha Ha-ha & Christ.
Gall in every direction, putrid olives,
stench of the Jersey flats, the greasy clasp
crones in black doorways afford their violent clients
A physicist’s lovely wife grinned to me in Cambridge
she only liked, apart from getting gamblers hot
& stalk out on them, a wino for the night
in a room off Scollay Square, a bottle, his efforts
Dust in my sore mouth, this deafening wind,
frightful spaces down from all sides, I’m pale
I faint for some soft & solid & sudden way out
as quiet as hemlock in that Attic prose
with comprehending friends attending—
a certain reluctance but desire here too,
the sweet cold numbing upward from my burning feet,
a last & calm request, which will be granted.
The Form
Mutinous & free I drifted off
unsightly. I did not see the creatures watch.
I had forgotten about the creatures, which
were kind and whether any of them was mine.
I am a daemon. Ah, when Mother was ill
a Sister took me into their little chapel
to admire the plaster angels: ‘Mine are real,’
I said, ‘and fly around the chapel on my farm.’
O torso hurled high in great ’planes from town
down on convulsing town, brainsick applause
thick to sick ear, thro’ sixteen panicked nights
a trail of tilted bottles. I had no gun,
and neither Wednesday nor Thursday did buy one
but Friday and I put it in my bag
and bought a wide-eyed & high-yaller whore
for company of darkness. Deep in dream
I saw myself upreared like William the Silent
over his tomb in Delft, armoured & impotent;
she shook me screaming. In another place
I shuddered as I combed & saw my face.
Swallowing, I felt myself deranged
and would be ever so. He has spewed me out.
I wandered, for some reason, raging, home
where then I really hurt. All that life ahead alone
vised me from midnight. I prepared for dawn.
An odd slight thought like a key slid somewhere:
‘Only tomorrow.’ Wondering, I said: ‘Oh.
It’s possible, then.’
My light terrible body unlocked, I leaned upon You.
Ecce Homo
Long long with wonder I thought you human,
almost beyond humanity but not.
Once, years ago, only in a high bare hall
of the great Catalan museum over Barcelona,
I thought you might be more—
a Pantocrator glares down, from San Clemente de Tahull,
making me feel you probably were divine,
but not human, thro’ that majestic image.
Now I’ve come on
something where you seem both—
a photograph of it only—
Burgundian, of painted & gilt wood,
life-size almost (not that we know your Semitic stature),
attenuated, your dead head bent forward sideways,
your long feet hanging, your thin long arms out
in unconquerable beseeching—
A Prayer After All
Father, Father, I am overwhelmed.
I cannot speak tonight.
Do you receive me back into Your sight?
It seems it must be so, for
strangely the Virgin came into my mind
as I stood beside my bed—
whom I not only have not worshippéd
since childhood, but also
harsh words have said of, that she pushed her Son
before his time was come
which he rebuked her for, and leaving home
repudiated hers & her—
and for no reason, standing in the dark
before I had knelt down
(as is my custom) to speak with You, I found
my tongue feeling its way
thro’ the Hail Mary, trying phrase by phrase
its strangeness, for the unwelcome
to my far mind estranged, awaiting some
unacceptable sense, and
Father I was amazed I could find none
and I have walked downstairs
to sit & wonder: You must have been Theirs
all these years, and They Yours,
and now I suppose I have prayed to You after all
and Her and I suppose she is the Queen of Heaven
under Your greater glory, even
more incomprehensible but forgiving glory.
Back
I was out of your Church for 43 years, my Dear;
adopted back in, welling blood.
Admire the techniques of your ministers
I must, succeeding, but could not enjoy them
during the rite: for the man in fury,
possessed by his own tumultuous & burning energy,
to bring to a halt is hard as tungsten carbide
and crook his knees is harder than to die.
Exceptional, singular, & mysterious,
ochered, forbidden to utter,
the revolted novice & veteran thro’ cold night
vigilant in the forest, a caring beast,
becoming sacral, perforates his nose
at first glow, in honour of the Mother.
John Berryman Page 28