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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  I. OPUS DEI

  Lauds

  Matins

  Prime

  Interstitial Office

  Tierce

  Sext

  Nones

  Vespers

  Compline

  II

  Washington in Love

  Beethoven Triumphant

  Your Birthday in Wisconsin You Are 140

  Drugs Alcohol Little Sister

  In Memoriam (1914–1953)

  III

  Gislebertus’ Eve

  Scholars at the Orchid Pavilion

  Tampa Stomp

  Old Man Goes South Again Alone

  The Handshake, The Entrance

  Lines to Mr Frost

  He Resigns

  No

  The Form

  Ecce Homo

  A Prayer After All

  Back

  Hello

  IV. SCHERZO

  Navajo Setting the Record Straight

  Henry by Night

  Henry’s Understanding

  Defensio in Extremis

  Damn You, Jim D., You Woke Me Up

  V

  Somber Prayer

  Unknowable? perhaps not altogether

  Minnesota Thanksgiving

  A Usual Prayer

  Overseas Prayer

  Amos

  Certainty Before Lunch

  The Prayer of the Middle-Aged Man

  ‘How Do You Do, Dr Berryman, Sir?’

  The Facts & Issues

  King David Dances

  By John Berryman

  Copyright

  TO MARTHA B

  passion & awe

  We haue piped vnto you, and ye haue not danced:

  wee haue mourned vnto you, and ye haue not lamented.

  On parle toujours de ‘l’art réligieux’. L’art est

  réligieux.

  And indeed if Eugène Irténev was mentally deranged

  everyone is in the same case; the most mentally de-

  ranged people are certainly those who see in others

  indications of insanity they do not notice in themselves.

  Feu! feu! feu!

  Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages

  I OPUS DEI

  (a layman’s winter mockup, wherein moreover

  the Offices are not within one day said

  but thro’ their hours at intervals

  over many weeks—such being the World)

  Lord, have mercy on my son: for he is lunatick,

  and sore vexed: for ofttimes he falleth into

  the fire, and oft into the water.

  And he did evil, because he prepared not

  his heart to seek the Lord.

  Lauds

  LET us rejoice on our cots, for His nocturnal miracles

  antique outside the Local Group & within it

  & within our hearts in it, and for quotidian miracles

  parsecs-off yielding to the Hale reflector.

  Oh He is potent in the corners. Men

  with Him are potent: quasars we intuit,

  and sequent to sufficient discipline

  we perceive this glow keeping His winter out.

  My marvellous black new brim-rolled felt is both stuffy & raffish.

  I hit my summit with it, in firelight.

  Maybe I only got a Yuletide tie

  (increasing sixty) & some writing-paper

  but ha (haha) I’ve bought myself a hat!

  Plus-strokes from position zero! Its feathers sprout.

  Thank you, Your Benevolence!

  permissive, smiling on our silliness You forged.

  Matins

  THOU hard. I will be blunt: Like widening

  blossoms again glad toward Your soothe of sun

  & solar drawing forth, I find meself

  little this bitter morning, Lord, tonight.

  Less were you tranquil to me in my dark

  just now than tyrannous. O some bore down

  sore with enticements—One abandoned me—

  half I swelled up toward—till I crash awake.

  However, lo, across what wilderness

  in vincible ignorance past forty years

  lost to (as now I see) Your sorrowing

  I strayed abhorrent, blazing with my Self.

  I thought I was in private with the Devil

  hounding me upon Daddy’s cowardice

  (trustless in stir the freeze: ‘Do your own time’).

  Intertangled all—choking, groping bodies.

  ‘Behold, thou art taken in thy mischief,

  because thou art a bloody man’ with horror

  loud down from Heaven did I not then hear,

  but sudden’ was received,—appointed even

  poor scotographer, far here from Court,

  humming over goodnatured Handel’s Te Deum.

  I waxed, upon surrender, strenuous

  ah almost able service to devise.

  I am like your sun, Dear, in a state of shear—

  parts of my surface are continually slipping past others,

  not You, not You. O I may, even, wave

  in crisis like a skew Wolf-Rayet star.

  Seas and hills, the high lakes, Superior,

  accomplish your blue or emerald donations—

  manifest too your soft forbearance, hard

  & flint for fierce man hardly to take in.

  I take that in. Yes. Just now. I read that.

  Hop foot to foot, hurl the white pillows about,

  jubilant brothers: He is our overlord,

  holding up yet with crimson flags the Sun

  whom He’ll embark soon mounting fluent day!

  Prime

  OCCLUDES wild dawn. Up thro’ green ragged clouds

  one sun is tearing, beset alders sway

  weary under swollen sudden drops

  and February winds shudder our doors,

  Lord, as thou knowest. What fits me today

  which work I can? I’ve to poor minimum

  pared my commitments; still I’m sure to err

  grievous & frequent before Evensong

  and both I long toward & abhor that coming.

  Yet if You and I make a majority

  (as old Claudel encouraged) what sharp law

  can pass this morning?—upon which, I take heart.

  Also: ‘The specific gravity of iron

  is one and one-half times the size of Switzerland.’

  Zany enlivens. People, pipe with pipes:

  the least of us is back on contract, even

  unto myself succeeding in sunrise

  all over again!

  All customary blessings,

  anathemas of the date (post-Lupercal,

  and sure The Baby was my valentine),

  I’m not Your beaver, here disabled, still

  it is an honour, where some have achieved,

  to limp behind along, humming, & keen

  again upon what blue trumps, hazy, vainless glory.

  In Alexandria, O Saint Julian

  gouty, chair-borne, displayed then on a camel

  thorough the insufferable city, and burned.

  In other places, many other holy

  bishops, confessors, and martyrs. Thanks be to God.

  Interstitial Office

  BITTER
upon conviction

  (even of the seven women jurors

  several wept) I will not kneel just now,

  Father. I know I must

  but being black & galled for these young men,

  sick with their savage Judge

  (‘we felt we had no alternative,

  since all their evidence was ordered stricken’)—

  deep fatigue.

  Conducting his own defence: ‘men do pass laws

  that usurp God’s power …

  I hope you’ll try in your own way to speak peace.

  God guide you.’ Grim the prosecutor:

  ‘He’s trying to weasel his way out of it.’

  Draft records here would have gone up in fire.

  Peasant ladies & poupies there went up go up in fire.

  Who sat thro’ all three trials tells me the juror in blue

  looked inconsolably sad, and hid her eyes,

  when one propped up on his table a little hand-lettered sign

  WE LOVE YOU.

  The judge is called P N.

  This is of record. Where slept then Your lightning?

  Loafed Your torque.

  Well. Help us all! Yes—yes—I kneel.

  Tierce

  OH half as fearful for the yawning day

  where full the Enemy’s paratus and

  I clearly may

  wholly from prime time fail, as yet from yesterday

  with good heart grateful having gone no more

  (under what gentle tempting You knew I bore)

  than what occurred astray,

  I almost at a loss now genuflect and pray:

  Twice, thrice each day five weeks at ‘as we forgive

  those who trespass against us’ I have thought

  ah his envenomed & most insolent missive

  and I have done it!—and I damn him still

  odd times & unawares catch myself at it:

  I’m not a good man, I won’t ever be,

  there’s no health in here. You expect too much.

  This pseudo-monk is all but at despair.

  My blustering & whining & ill will

  versus His will—Forgive my insolence,

  since when I was a fervent child to You

  and Father Boniface each 5 a.m.

  But this world that was not. Lavender & oval,

  lilac, dissolve into one’s saying hurriedly

  ‘In sex my husband is brutal, beating, dirty, and drunk.’

  Has this become Thy will, Thou Reconciler?

  Sext

  HIGH noon has me pitchblack, so in hope out,

  slipping thro’ stasis, my heart skeps a beat

  actuellement,

  reflecting on the subtler menace of decline.

  Who mentioned in his middle age ‘Great Death

  wars in us living which will have us all’

  caused choreographers to tinker maps

  pointing a new domestic capital

  and put before Self-Preservation ‘l)’.

  We do not know, deep now the dire age on,

  if it’s so, or mere a nightmare of one dark one,

  Mani’s by no means ultimate disciple.

  I wish You would clear this up. Moreover, I know

  it may extend millennia, or ever, till

  you tell somebody to. Meantime: Okay.

  Now hear this programme for my remnant of today.

  Corpuscle-Donor, to the dizzy tune

  of half a hundred thousand while I blink

  losing that horrid same

  scarlet amount and reel intact ahead:

  so of rare Heart repair my fracturing heart

  obedient to disobedience

  minutely, wholesale, that come midnight neither

  my mortal sin nor thought upon it lose me.

  Nones

  PROBLEM. I cannot come among Your saints,

  it’s not in me—‘Velle’ eh?—I will, and fail.

  But I would rather not be lost from You—

  if I could hear of a middle ground, I’d opt:

  a decent if minute salvation, sort of, on some fringe.

  I am afraid, afraid. Brothers, who if

  you are afraid are my brothers—veterans of fear—

  pray with me now in the hour of our living.

  It’s Eleseus’ grave makes the demons tremble,

  I forget under what judge he conquered the world,

  we’re not alone here. Hearing Mark viii, though,

  I’m sure to be ashamed of by. I am ashamed.

  Riotous doubt assailed me on the stair,

  I paused numb. Not much troubled with doubt,

  not used to it. In a twinkling can man be lost?

  Deep then in thought, and thought brought no relief.

  But praying after, and somewhat after prayer

  on no occasion fear had gone away!

  I was alone with You again: ‘the iron did swim’.

  It has been proved to me again & again

  He does not want me to be lost. Who does? The other.

  But ‘a man’s shaliach is as it were himself’:

  I am Your person.

  I have done this & that which I should do,

  and given, and attended, and been still,

  but why I do so I cannot be sure,

  I am suspicious of myself. Help me!

  I am olding & ignorant, and the work is great,

  daylight is long, will ever I be done,

  for the work is not for man, but the Lord God.

  Now I have prepared with all my might for it

  and mine O shrinks a micro-micro-minor

  post-ministry, and of Thine own to Thee I have given,

  and there is none abiding but woe or Heaven,

  teste the pundits. Me I’m grounded for peace.

  Flimsy between cloth, what may I attain

  who slither in my garments? there’s not enough of me,

  Master, for virtue. I’m loose, at a loss.

  Lo, where in this whirlpool sheltered in bone,

  only less whirlpool bone, envisaging,

  a sixtieth of an ounce to every pint,

  sugar to blood, or coma or convulsion,

  I hit a hundred and twenty notes a second

  as many as I may to the glory of confronting—

  unstable man, man torn by blast & gale—

  Your figure, adamantly frontal.

  Vespers

  VANITY! hog-vanity, ape-lust

  slimed half my blue day, interspersed

  solely almost with conversation feared,

  difficult, dear, leaned forward toward & savoured,

  survivaling between. I have not done well.

  Contempt—if even the man be judged sincere—

  verging on horror, top a proper portion,

  of the poor man in paracme, greeding still.

  That’s nothing, nothing! For his great commands

  have reached me here—to love my enemy

  as I love me—which is quite out of the question!

  and worse still, to love You with my whole mind—

  insufferable & creative addition to Deuteronomy 6—

  Shift! Shift!

  Frantic I cast about abroad

  for avenues of out: Who really this this?

  Can all be lost, then? (But some do these things …

  I flinch from some horrible saints half the happy mornings—

  so that’s blocked off.) Maybe it’s not God’s voice

  only Christ’s only. (But our Lord is our Lord.

  No vent there.) If more’s demanded of man than can

  man summon, You’re unjust. Suppose not. See Jewish history,

  tormented & redeemed, millennia later

  in Freud & Einstein forcing us sorry & free,

  Jerusalem Israeli! flames Anne Frank

  a beacon to the Gentiles weltering.

  With so great power bitter, so marvellous mild even mercy?

  It’s
not conformable. It must be so,

  but I am lost in it, dire Friend. Only I remember

  of Solomon’s cherubim ‘their faces were inward’.

  And thro’ that veil of blue, & crimson, & linen,

  & blue, You brood across forgiveness and

  the house fills with a cloud, so that the priests

  cannot stand to minister by reason of the cloud.

  Compline

  I WOULD at this late hour as little as may be

  (in-negligent Father) plead. Not that I’m not attending,

  only I kneel here spelled

  under a mystery of one midnight

  un-numbing now toward sorting in & out

  I’ve got to get as little as possible wrong

  O like Josiah then I heard with horror

  instructions ancient as for the prime time

  I am the king’s son who squat down in rags

  declared unfit by wise friends to inherit

  and nothing of me left but skull & feet

  & bloody among their dogs the palms of my hands.

  Adorns my crossbar Your high frenzied Son,

  mute over catcalls. How to conduct myself?

  Does ‘l’affabilité, l’humilité’

  drift hither from the Jesuit wilderness,

  a programme so ambitious? I am ambitious

  but I have always stood content with towers

  & traffic quashing thro’ my canyons wild,

  gunfire & riot fan out new Detroit.

  Lord, long the day done—lapse, & by bootstraps,

  oaths & toads, tranquil microseconds,

  memory engulfing, odor of bacon burning

  again—phantasmagoria prolix—

  a rapture, though, of the Kingdom here here now

  in the heart of a child—not far, nor hard to come by,

  but natural as water falling, cupped

  & lapped & slaking the child’s dusty thirst!

  If He for me as I feel for my daughter,

  being His son, I’ll sweat no more tonight

  but happy hymn & sleep. I have got it made,

  and so have all we of contrition, for

  if He loves me He must love everybody

  and Origen was right & Hell is empty

  or will be at apocatastasis.

  Sinners, sin on. We’ll suffer now & later

  but not forever, dear friends & brothers! Moreover:

  my old Black freshman friend’s mild formula

  for the quarter-mile, ‘I run the first 220

  as fast as possible, to get out in front.

  Then I run the second 220 even faster,