John Berryman Read online

Although you know as well as I whose tooth

  Sunk in our heels, the western guise of fate.

  When Patrick Barton chased the murderer

  He heard behind him in the wood

  Pursuit, and suddenly he knew hé fled:

  He was the murderer, the others were

  His vigilance. But when he crouched behind

  A tree, the tree moved off and left

  Him naked while the cry came on; he laughed

  And like a hound he leapt out of his mind.

  I wish for you—the moon was full, is gone—

  Whatever bargain can be got

  From the violent world our fathers bought,

  For which we pay with fantasy at dawn,

  Dismay at noon, fatigue, horror by night.

  May love, or its image in work,

  Bring you the brazen luck to sleep with dark

  And so to get responsible delight.

  1938

  Desires of Men and Women

  Exasperated, worn, you conjure a mansion,

  The absolute butlers in the spacious hall,

  Old silver, lace, and privacy, a house

  Where nothing has for years been out of place,

  Neither shoe-horn nor affection been out of place,

  Breakfast in summer on the eastern terrace,

  All justice and all grace.

  At the reception

  Most beautifully you conduct yourselves—

  Expensive and accustomed, bow, speak French,

  That Cinquecento miniature recall

  The Duke presented to your great-grandmother—

  And none of us, my dears, would dream of you

  The half-lit and lascivious apartments

  That are in fact your goal, for which you’d do

  Murder if you had not your cowardice

  To prop the law; or dream of you the rooms,

  Glaring and inconceivably vulgar,

  Where now you are, where now you wish for life,

  Whence you project your naked fantasies.

  World-Telegram

  Man with a tail heads eastward for the Fair.

  Can open a pack of cigarettes with it.

  Was weaving baskets happily, it seems,

  When found, the almost Missing Link, and brought

  From Ceylon in the interests of science.

  The correspondent doesn’t know how old.

  Two columns left, a mother saw her child

  Crushed with its father by a ten-ton truck

  Against a loading platform, while her son,

  Small, frightened, in a Sea Scout uniform,

  Watched from the Langley. All needed treatment.

  Berlin and Rome are having difficulty

  With a new military pact. Some think

  Russia is not too friendly towards London.

  The British note is called inadequate.

  An Indian girl in Lima, not yet six,

  Has been delivered by Caesarian.

  A boy. They let the correspondent in:

  Shy, uncommunicative, still quite pale,

  A holy picture by her, a blue ribbon.

  Right of the centre, and three columns wide,

  A rather blurred but rather ominous

  Machine-gun being set up by militia

  This morning in Harlan County, Kentucky.

  Apparently some miners died last night.

  ‘Personal brawls’ is the employers’ phrase.

  All this on the front page. Inside, penguins.

  The approaching television of baseball.

  The King approaching Quebec. Cotton down.

  Skirts up. Four persons shot. Advertisements.

  Twenty-six policemen are decorated.

  Mother’s Day repercussions. A film star

  Hopes marriage will preserve him from his fans.

  News of one day, one afternoon, one time.

  If it were possible to take these things

  Quite seriously, I believe they might

  Curry disorder in the strongest brain,

  Immobilize the most resilient will,

  Stop trains, break up the city’s food supply,

  And perfectly demoralize the nation.

  11 May 1939

  Conversation

  Whether the moorings are invisible

  Or slipt, we said we could not tell,

  But argument held one thing sure

  Which none of us that night could well endure:

  The ship is locked with fog, no man aboard

  Can make out what he’s moving toward,

  There’s little food, few love, less sleep,

  The sea is dark and we are told it’s deep.

  Where is an officer who knows this coast?

  If all such men long since have faced

  Downward, one summon. Who knows how,

  With what fidelity, his voice heard now

  Could shout directions from the ocean’s floor?

  Traditional characters no more

  Their learnéd simple parts rehearse

  But bed them softly down from the time’s curse.

  A snapt short log pitched out upon the hearth,

  The flaming harbinger come forth

  Of holocausts that night and day

  Flake from the mind its skinny sovereignty.

  We watched the embers cool, embers that brought

  To one man there the failing thought

  Of cities stripped of knowledge, men,

  Our continent a wilderness again.

  These are conclusions of the night, we said;

  And drank; and were not satisfied.

  The fire died down, smoke in the air

  Assumed the alarming postures of our fear,—

  The overhead horror, in the padded room

  The man who will not tell his name,

  The guns and subtle friends who face

  Into this delicate and dangerous place.

  1938

  Ancestor

  The old men wept when the Old Man in blue

  Bulked in the doorway of the train, Time spun

  And in that instant’s revolution Time

  (Who cannot love old men) dealt carelessly

  Passions and shames upon his hardihood,

  Seeing the wet eyes of his former staff:

  . . Crossing from Tennessee, the river at flood,

  White River Valley, his original regiment,

  The glowflies winking in the gully’s dusk,

  Three horses shot from under him at Shiloh

  Fell, the first ball took Hindman’s horse as well

  And then the two legs from an orderly

  Rain on the lost field, mire and violence,

  Corruption; Klan-talk, half-forgotten tongue

  Rubbed up for By-Laws and its Constitution,

  The Roman syllables

  he an exile fled,

  Both his plantations, great-grandmother’s too

  Gone, fled south and south into Honduras

  Where great-grandmother was never reconciled

  To monkeys or the thought of monkeys

  once

  Tricked into taking bites of one, she kept

  Eight months her bed

  fire on the colony,

  Lifting of charges, and a late return,

  The stranger in his land, and silence, silence . .

  (Only the great grey riddled cloak spoke out

  And sometimes a sudden breath or look spoke out)

  Reflecting blue saw in the tears of men,

  The tyrant shade, shade of the last of change,

  And coughed once, twice, massive and motionless;

  Now Federal, now Sheriff, near four-score,

  Controlled with difficulty his old eyes

  As he stepped down, for the first time, in blue.

  World’s Fair

  The crowd moves forward on the midway, back

  And forward, men and women from every State

  Insisti
ng on their motion like a clock.

  I stand by the roller-coaster, and wait.

  An hour I have waited, fireworks on the lake

  Tell me it’s late, and yet it is not that

  Which rattles at the bottom of my mind,

  Slight, like a faint sound sleepy on the wind

  To the traveller when he has lost his track.

  Suddenly in torn images I trace

  The inexhaustible ability of a man

  Loved once, long lost, still to prevent my peace,

  Still to suggest my dreams and starve horizon.

  Childhood speaks to me in an austere face.

  The Chast Mayd only to the thriving Swan

  Looks back and back with lecherous intent,

  Being the one nail known, an excrement;

  Middleton’s grave in a forgotten place.

  That recognition fades now, and I stand

  Exhausted, angry, beside the wooden rail

  Where tireless couples mount still, hand in hand,

  For the complex drug of catapult and fall

  To blot out the life they cannot understand

  And never will forgive. The wind is stale,

  The crowd thins, and my friend has not yet come.

  It is long past midnight, time to track for home

  And my work and the instructor down my mind.

  Travelling South

  A red moon hung above the pines that night

  Travelling, as we travelled, south. First one,

  Then two, streamers of cloud across the moon

  Crept and trivided the cold brooding light

  Like blood. The captive hum under the hood

  Pacing, the pebbles plunging, throbbing mind

  Raced through the night, afraid of what we’d find

  For brother at the end, sightless or dead.

  The same womb bore us. What is the time of man?

  At what time does he rise and go to bed?

  When shall a young man bend his hopeful head

  Upon the block, under a red red moon,

  And lose that dear head? I was dull with fear,

  The car devoured the darkness, the moon hung,

  Blood over the pines, and the cold wind sang

  Welcome, welcome the executioner.

  O then the lighted house, the nurse, at last

  Painfully but his real face, his hand

  Moving, his voice to melt the frozen wind;

  Trouble but trouble that would soon be past;

  Injury, but salvation. The headsman stood

  Once at the block, looked on the young man stark,

  And let that young man rise. In the flowing dark

  The pines consumed the moon and the moon of blood.

  At Chinese Checkers

  I

  Again—but other faces bend with mine

  Upon the board—I settle to this game

  And drive my marbles leaping or in line

  Towards the goal, the triangular blue aim

  Of all my red ones, as it was before.

  Sitting with strangers by a Northern lake

  I watch the opening and the shutting door,

  The paradigms of marble shift and break.

  II

  The table moves before my restless eyes,

  Part of an oak, an occupation once,

  This town humming with men and lumber, cries,

  Will, passionate activity that since

  Dwindled, died when the woods cut without plan

  Were thirty years ago exhausted. Now

  The jackpine where the locomotive ran

  Springs up wild; the docks are rotten with snow.

  III

  Last night for the first time I saw the Lights,

  The folding of the Lights like upright cloud

  Swinging as, in a childhood summer, kites

  Swung, and the boys who owned the kites were proud.

  What pride was active in that gorgeous sky?

  What dreadful leniency compelled the men

  Southward, the crumpled men? Questions went by,

  Swung in the dark back and were gone again.

  IV

  Far on the dunes the wind is rising, sand

  Drifts with it, drops; under the rounding moon

  Deer, hesitating from the wood, will stand

  Until their promise is a lonely dune

  And they come forward, masters for the time

  Of all that mountainous dead world, cold light.

  The glittering rocks are naked as a tomb

  Where the sea was; alteration is the night.

  V

  Insistent voices recall me to the play.

  I triple over blue and yellow, sit

  Erect and smile; but what it is they say

  My ears will not accept, I mangle it,

  I see their faces change, I hear the wind

  Begin to whistle under the shut door,

  The door shudders, I cannot hold my mind,

  Backward, east, south it goes in the wind’s roar.

  VI

  I am again in the low and country room

  Where all that is was heart-wrung, had by hard

  Continual labour. We are at the game:

  Excited childish cries over the board,

  The old man grumbling in the darkness there

  Beside the stove, Baynard is still, intent,

  And to my left his sister has her chair,

  Her great eyes to the flashing marbles bent.

  VII

  The shy head and the delicate throat conceal

  A voice that even undisciplined can stir

  The country blood over a Southern hill.

  Will Ingreet’s voice bring her renown, bring her

  That spontaneous acclaim an artist needs

  Unless he works in the solitary dark?

  What prophecy, what hope can older heads

  Proclaim, beyond the exhaustion of the work?

  VIII

  How shall we counsel the unhappy young

  Or young excited in their thoughtlessness

  By game or deviltry or popular song?

  Too many, blazing like disease, confess

  In their extinction the consuming fear

  No man has quite escaped: the good, the wise,

  The masters of their generation, share

  This pressure of inaction on their eyes.

  IX

  I move the white, jumping the red and green,

  Blue if I can, to finish where the blue

  Marbles before they issued forth began,

  And fill the circles, as I ought to do.

  Can I before the children win that place?

  Their energies are here at work, not mine:

  The beautiful absorption on Sue’s face

  My crowded travelling face cannot design.

  X

  The fox-like child I was or assume I was

  I lose, the abstract remember only; all

  The lightness and the passion for running lose

  Together with all my terror, the blind call

  At midnight for the mother. How shall we know

  The noon we are to be in night we are?

  The altering winds are dark and the winds blow

  Agitation and rest, unclear, unclear.

  XI

  Deep in the unfriendly city Delmore lies

  And cannot sleep, and cannot bring his mind

  And cannot bring those marvellous faculties

  To bear upon the day sunk down behind,

  The unsteady night, or the time to come.

  Slack the large frame, he sprawls upon his bed

  Useless, the eloquent mouth relaxed and dumb,

  Trouble and mist in the apathetic head.

  XII

  What prophecies, what travel? Strangers call

  Across the miles of table, and I return,

  Bewildered, see burnt faces rise and fall

  In the recapitulation
of their urn.

  I speak; all of us laugh; the game goes on.

  The Northern wind is moaning still outside.

  The sense of change, suns gone up and come down,

  Whirls in my tired head, and it will abide.

  XIII

  Against my will once in another game

  I spat a piece of tooth out—this was love

  Or the innocence of love, long past its time

  Virgin with trust, which time makes nothing of.

  The wind is loud. I wonder, Will it grow,

  That trust, again? Can it again be strong?

  What rehabilitations can the heart know

  When the heart is split, when the faithful heart is wrong?

  XIV

  Venus on the half-shell was found a dish

  To madden a fanatic: from the nave

  Rolled obloquy and lust. Sea without fish,

  Flat sea, and Simonetta had a grave

  Deeper than the dark cliff of any tooth,

  Deeper than memory. Obstinate, malicious,

  The man across the table shouts an oath,

  The sea recedes, strangers possess the house.

  XV

  Marbles are not the marbles that they were,

  The accurate bright knuckle-breakers boys

  In alleys, where there is no one to care,

  Use, in the schoolyard use at noon, and poise

  As Pheidias his incomparable gold.

  The gold is lost. But issued from the tomb,

  Delmore’s magical tongue. What the sea told

  Will keep these violent strangers from our room.

  XVI

  The marbles of the blood drive to their place,

  Foam in the heart’s level. The heart will mend,

  Body will break and mend, the foam replace

  For even the unconsolable his taken friend.

  Wind is the emblem of the marbles’ rest,

  The sorrowful, the courageous marble’s hurt

  And strange recovery. Stubborn in the breast

  The break and ache, the plunging powerful heart.

  1939

  The Animal Trainer (1)

  I told him: The time has come, I must be gone.

  It is time to leave the circus and circus days,

  The admissions, the menagerie, the drums,

  Excitements of disappointment and praise.

  In a suburb of the spirit I shall seize

  The steady and exalted light of the sun,

  And live there, out of the tension that decays,

  Until I become a man alone of noon.

  Heart said: Can you do without your animals?

  The looking, licking, smelling animals?

  The friendly fumbling beast? The listening one?