Berryman's Sonnets
Page 6
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 pavanne, 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 hope lets 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 lost 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 work you here a wistful specimen)
Be, to you affable and supple, when
The music they call music fills your ears?
Room still? Alive O to my animals’ tears?
Haunted by cagy sighs? The cries of men
Versed are you in? Your Tetragrammaton—
Bach, Mozart, Beethoven & Schubert—hears.
No quarrel here once! Pindar sang both sides,—
Two thousand years their easy marriage lasted,
Until some coldness grew . . they moved apart . .
Only one now to rile the other rides
Sometimes, neither will say how he has fasted,
They stare with desire, and spar . . and crib . . and part.
[ 93 ]
The man who made her let me climb the derrick
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 were absence’ adept, a glaring eye;
Or I were agile to this joy, this letter,
You say from Fox 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 Peter, Lise,
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 ἰού ἰού
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, fait
hful 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 Jersey hole,
A generation of 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 ‘broken 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
Jerguer, who frisked me, hops aside and jeers.
The dog’s and monkey’s years—pot’s residue,
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 XXXX, February
Twice-ten-day, by a doorway in McIntosh,
So quietly neither the rip’s cold slosh
Nor the meshing of great wheels warned me, unwar
y,
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 no 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-coming 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 that house
When . . neither here, nor there, no where, were you,
Nights like long knives; . . two letters! . . times when your voice
Nearly I latched. 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.