Berryman's Sonnets
Page 5
Striking my hands, they say repeatedly
I muttered; although I could hear and see
I knew no one.—I am silent in my chair,
And stronger and more cold is my despair
At last, for I have come into a country
Whose vivid Queen upon no melody
Admits me. Manchmal glaub ich, ich kann nicht mehr.
Song follows song, the chatterer to the fire
Would follow soon . . Deep in Ur’s royal pits
Sit still the courtly bodies, a little bowl
By each, attired to voluntary blitz . .
In Shub-ad’s grave the fingers of a girl
Were touching still, when they found her, the strings of her lyre.
[ 66 ]
Astronomies and slangs to find you, dear,
Star, art-breath, crowner, conscience! and to chart
For kids unborn your distal beauty, part
On part that startles, till you blaze more clear
And witching than your sister Venus here
To a late age can, though her senior start
Is my new insomnia,—swift sleepless art
To draw you even . . and to draw you near.
I prod our English: cough me up a word,
Slip me an epithet will justify
My daring fondle, fumble of far fire
Crackling nearby, unreasonable as a surd,
A flash of light, an insight: I am the shy
Vehicle of your cadmium shine . . your choir.
[ 67 ]
Faith like the warrior ant swarming, enslaving
Or griding others, you gave me soft as dew,
My darling, drawing me suddenly into you,
Your arms’ strong kindness at my back, your weaving
Thighs agile to me, white teeth in your heaving
Hard, your face bright and dark, back, as we screw
Our lives together—twin convulsion—blue
Crests curl, to rest . . again the ivy waving.
Faiths other fall. Afterwards I kissed you
So (Lise) long, and your eyes so waxed, marine,
Wider I drowned . . light to their surface drawn
Down met the wild light (derelict weeks I missed you
Leave me forever) upstreaming; never-seen,
Your radiant glad soul surfaced in the dawn.
[ 68 ]
Where the lane from the highway swerves the first drops fell
Like lead, I bowed my head and drifted up.
Now in the grove they pat like footsteps, but
Not hers, Despair’s. In slant lines sentinel
Silver and thin, it rains so into Hell,
Unvisited these thousand years. I grope
A little in the wind after a hope
For sun before she wakes . . all might be well.
All might yet be well . . I wandered just
Down to the upper lane now, the sky was clearing,
And as I scrawl, the sun breaks. Ah, what use?
She said if rain, no,—in vain self-abuse
I lie a fairy well! cloud disappearing
Not lonelier, leaving like me: we must.
[ 69 ]
For you am I collared O to quit my dear
My sandy-haired mild good and most beautiful
Most helpless and devoted wife? I pull
Crazy away from this; but too from her
Resistlessly I draw off, months have, far
And quarrelling—irrelation—numb and dull
Dead Sea with tiny aits . . Love at the full
Had wavered, seeing, foresuffering us here.
Unhappy all her lone strange life until
Somehow I friended it. And the Master catches
Me strongly from behind, and clucks, and tugs.
He has, has he? my heart-relucting will.
She spins on silent and the needle scratches.
—This all, Lise? and stark kisses, stealthy hugs?
[ 70 ]
Under Scorpion both, back in the Sooner State
Where the dry winds winnow the soul, we both were born,
And we have cast our origin, and the Horn
Neither has frankly scanted, others imitate
Us; and we have come a long way, late
For depth enough, betimes enough for torn
Hangnails of nerves and innocent love, we turn
Together in this vize lips, eyes, our Fate.
When the cam slid, the prodigious fingers tightened
And we began to fuse, weird afternoon
Early in May (the Third), we both were frightened;
A month we writhed, in sudden love like a scrimmage;
June’s wide loss worse; the fortnight after June
Worst. Vize and woe worked us this perfect image!
[ 71 ]
Our Sunday morning when dawn-priests were applying
Wafer and wine to the human wound, we laid
Ourselves to cure ourselves down: I’m afraid
Our vestments wanted, but Francis’ friends were crying
In the nave of pines, sun-satisfied, and flying
Subtle as angels about the barricade
Boughs made over us, deep in a bed half made
Needle-soft, half the sea of our simultaneous dying.
‘Death is the mother of beauty.’ Awry no leaf
Shivering with delight, we die to be well . .
Careless with sleepy love, so long unloving.
What if our convalescence must be brief
As we are, the matin meet the passing bell? . .
About our pines our sister, wind, is moving.
[ 72 ]
A Cambridge friend put in,—one whom I used
To pay small rope at chess to, who in vain
Luffed up to free a rook,—and through the strain
Of ten-year-old talk cocktails partly loosed
I forgot you, forgot you, for the first
Hour in months of watches . . Mozart’s pain
I heard then, in the cranny of the hurricane,
As since the chrisom caught me up immersed
I have heard nothing but the sough of the sea
And wide upon the open sea my friend
The sea-wind crying, out of its cave to roam
No more, no more . . until my memory
Swung you back like a lock: I sing the end,
Tolerant Aeolus to call me home.
[ 73 ]
Demand me again what Kafka’s riddles mean,
For I am the penal colony’s prime scribe:
From solitary, firing against the tribe
Uncanny judgments ancient and unclean.
I am the officer flat on my own machine,
Priest of the one Law no despair can bribe,
On whom the mort-prongs hover to inscribe
‘I FELL IN LOVE’ . . O none of this foreseen,
Adulteries and divorces cold I judged
And strapped the tramps flat. Now the harrow trembles
Down, a strap snaps, I wave—out of control—
To you to change the legend has not budged
These years: make the machine grave on me (stumbles
Someone to latch the strap) ‘I MET MY SOUL’.
[ 74 ]
All I did wrong, all the Grand Guignol years,
Tossed me here still able to touch you still.
I took the false turn on the fantastic hill
Continually, until the top appears.
Even my blind (last night) disordered tears
Conducted me to-morning. When I grew ill
Two years, I only taxed my doctors’ skill
To pass me to you fixed . . The damned sky clears
Into a decent sun (this week’s the worst
Ever I see-saw) half an hour: this town
My tomb becomes a kind of paradise . .
How then complain? Rain came with a burst,
Ridding the sky. Was it this e
vil clown
Or surviving lover you called to you? . . twice.
18 July
[ 75 ]
Swarthy when young; who took the tonsure; sign,
His coronation, wangled, his name re-said
For euphony; off to courts fluttered, and fled;
Professorships refused; upon one line
Worked years; and then that genial concubine.
Seventy springs he read, and wrote, and read.
On the day of the year his people found him dead
I read his story. Anew I studied mine.
Also there was Laura and three-seventeen
Sonnets to something like her . . twenty-one years . .
He never touched her. Swirl our crimes and crimes.
Gold-haired (too), dark-eyed, ignorant of rimes
Was she? Virtuous? The old brume seldom clears.
—Two guilty and crepe-yellow months
Lise! be our bright surviving actual scene.
[ 76 ]
The two plantations Greatgrandmother brought
My bearded General, back in a world would burn,
I thresh excited as I see return
Odd in this symbol you me last night taught . .
Your Two-fields rapt into the family ought
To save us: sensitivity, elegant, fern-
subtle, knit upon vigour enough to turn
A nation’s strong decline. I grind my thought
A bit more, and I bare the quick of the have
And have not, half have, less than half, O this
Fantasy of your gates ajar, gates barred.
Poaching and rack-rent do you hope will save
True to ourselves us, darling? owners, Lise!—
Heiress whose lovely holdings lie
too forkt for truth; called also Kierkegaard.
[ 77 ]
Fall and rise of her midriff bells. I watch.
Blue knee-long shorts, striped light shirt. Bright between
Copt hills of the cushion a lazy green
Her sun-incomparable face I watch.
A darkness dreams adown her softest crotch,
A hand dreams on her breast, two fingers lean,
The ring shows like a wound. Her hair swirls clean
Alone in the vague room’s morning-after botch.
Endymion’s Glaucus through a thousand years
Collected the bodies of lovers lost, until
His own beloved’s body rustled and sighed . .
So I would, O to spring—blotting her fears,
The others in this house, the house, road, hill—
As once she up the stair sprang to me, lips wide!
[ 78 ]
On the wheat-sacks, sullen with the ceaseless damp,
William and I sat hours and talked of you,
I talked of you. Potting porter. Just a few
Fireflies were out, no stars, no moon; no lamp.
The Great Dane licked my forearm like a stamp,
Surprisingly, in total darkness. Who
Responds with peaceful gestures, calm and new
This while, your home-strong love’s ferocious tramp?
Insonorous and easy night! I lusk,
Until we rise and strike rake-handles in
The nervous sacks to prod and mix with air;
Lest a flame sing out invisible and brusk
About the black barn . . Kingston (and my chin
Sank on the rake-end) suddenly
I longed for sick, your toxic music there.
[ 79 ]
I dreamt he drove me back to the asylum
Straight after lunch; we stood then at one end,
A sort of cafeteria behind, my friend
Behind me, nuts in groups about the room;
A dumbwaiter with five shelves was waiting (some-
thing’s missing here) to take me up—I bend
And lift a quart of milk to hide and tend,
Take with me. Everybody is watching, dumb.
I try to put it first among some worm-
shot volumes of the N. E. D. I had
On the top shelf —then somewhere else . . slowly
Lise comes up in a matron’s uniform
And with a look (I saw once) infinitely sad
In her grey eyes takes it away from me.
[ 80 ]
Infallible symbolist!—Tanker driven ashore,
An oil-ship by a tropical hurricane
Wrecked on a Delaware beach, the postcard’s scene;
On the reverse, words without signature:
Je m’en fiche du monde sans toi—in your
Hand for years busy in the liquid main
To tank you on—your Tulsa father’s vein,
Oil. All the worked and wind-slapt waters roar.
O my dear I am sorry, sorry, and glad! and glad
To trope you helpless, there, and needing me,
Where the dangerous land meets the disordered sea . .
Rich on the edge we wait our salvage, sad
And joyous, nervous, that the hired men come
Whom we require, to split us painfully home.
[ 81 ]
Four oval shadows, paired, ringed each by sun,
The closer smaller pair behind, third pair
Beating symmetrical to the sides in air
Apparently—the water-spiders’ dun
Bodies above unlike their shadows run,
Skim with six wires about a black-backed, fair-
bellied and long tube which does not appear
In the atomic drawings on the shallow mud.
My shadow on the vines and water should—
If so it were as Gath in Babylon—
Show a lover’s neurons waiting for a letter,
Brook near the postbox, or man’s fission’s crack
Of comfortable doom. Wé do this better: . .
A solid hypocrite squats there in black.
[ 82 ]
Why can’t, Lise, why shouldn’t they fall in love?
Mild both, both still in mix of studies, still
Unsteadied into life, novices of the will,
Formed upon others (us), disciples of
The Master and the revisionists: enough
Apart from their attraction, to unstill
The old calm loves (cyclonic loves) until
The electric air shocks them together, rough,
But better in love than grief, who can afford
No storms (ours). Fantasy! … Forget.
—I write this leaving Pennsylvania’s farms,
Seats 37, 12 Standees, I am tired
Unspeakably of standing: Kiss me, and let
Let me sit down and take you in my arms.
[ 83 ]
Impossible to speak to her, and worse
To keep on silent, silent hypocrite
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 Esther 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 ]
I wished, all the mild days of middle March
This special year, your blond good-nature might
(Lady) admit—kicking abruptly tight
With will and affection down your breast like starch—
Me to your story, in Spring, and stretch, and arch.
But who not flanks the wells of uncanny light
Sudden in bright sand towering? A bone sunned white.
Considering traveller
s bypass these and parch.
This came to less yes than an ice cream cone
Let stand . . though still my sense of it is brisk:
Blond silky cream, sweet cold, aches: a door shut.
Errors of order! Luck lies with the bone,
Who rushed (and rests) to meet your small mouth, risk
Your teeth irregular and passionate.
[ 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 bitterly 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 Lise, to whom you cry?