John Berryman Page 11
That standing up and worst of animals?
What will become of you in the pure light
When all your enemies are gone, and gone
The inexhaustible prospect of the night?
—But the night is now the body of my fear,
These animals are my distraction. Once
Let me escape the smells and cages here,
Once let me stand naked in the sun,
All these performances will be forgotten.
I shall concentrate in the sunlight there.
Said the conservative Heart: Your animals
Are occupation, food for you, your love
And your immense responsibility;
They are the travellers by which you live.
(Without you they will pace and pine, or die.)
—I reared them, tended them (I said) and still
They plague me, they will not perform, they run
Into forbidden corners, they fight, they steal.
Better to live like an artist in the sun.
—You are an animal trainer, Heart replied.
Without your animals leaping at your side
No sun will save you, nor this bloodless pride.
—What must I do then? Must I stay and work
With animals, and confront the night, in the circus?
—You léarn from animals. You léarn in the dark.
The Animal Trainer (2)
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 these animals?
The looking, licking, smelling animals?
The friendly fumbling beast? The listening one?
The standing up and worst of animals?
What will become of you in the pure light
When all your enemies are gone, and gone
The inexhaustible prospect of the night?
—But the night is now the body of my fear,
These animals are my distraction! Once
Let me escape the smells and cages here,
Once let me stand naked in the sun,
All their performances will be forgotten.
I shall concentrate in the sunlight there.
Said the conservative Heart: These animals
Are occupation, food for you, your love
And your despair, responsibility:
They are the travellers by which you live.
Without you they will pace and pine, or die.
—What soul-delighting tasks do they perform?
They quarrel, snort, leap, lie down, their delight
Merely a punctual meal and to be warm.
Justify their existence in the night!
—The animals are coupling, and they cry
‘The circus is, it is our mystery,
It is a world of dark where animals die.’
—Animals little and large, be still, be still:
I’ll stay with you. Suburb and sun are pale.
—Animals are your destruction, and your will.
III
1 September 1939
The first, scattering rain on the Polish cities.
That afternoon a man squat’ on the shore
Tearing a square of shining cellophane.
Some easily, some in evident torment tore,
Some for a time resisted, and then burst.
All this depended on fidelity . .
One was blown out and borne off by the waters,
The man was tortured by the sound of rain.
Children were sent from London in the morning
But not the sound of children reached his ear.
He found a mangled feather by the lake,
Lost in the destructive sand this year
Like feathery independence, hope. His shadow
Lay on the sand before him, under the lake
As under the ruined library our learning.
The children play in the waves until they break.
The Bear crept under the Eagle’s wing and lay
Snarling; the other animals showed fear,
Europe darkened its cities. The man wept,
Considering the light which had been there,
The feathered gull against the twilight flying.
As the little waves ate away the shore
The cellophane, dismembered, blew away.
The animals ran, the Eagle soared and dropt.
Desire Is a World by Night
The history of strangers in their dreams
Being irresponsible, is fun for men,
Whose sons are neither at the Front nor frame
Humiliating weakness to keep at home
Nor wince on principle, wearing mother grey,
Honoured by radicals. When the mind is free
The catechetical mind can mince and tear
Contemptible vermin from a stranger’s hair
And then sleep.
In our parents’ dreams we see
Vigour abutting on senility,
Stiff blood, and weathered with the years, poor vane;
Unfortunate but inescapable.
Although this wind bullies the windowpane
Are the children to be kept responsible
For the world’s decay? Carefully we choose
Our fathers, carefully we cut out those
On whom to exert the politics of praise.
Heard after dinner, in defenceless ease,
The dreams of friends can puzzle, dazzle us
With endless journeys through unfriendly snow,
Malevolent faces that appear and frown
Where nothing was expected, the sudden stain
On spotless window-ledges; these we take
Chuckling, but take them with us when we go,
To study in secret, late, brooding, looking
For trails and parallels. We have a stake
In this particular region, and we look
Excitedly for situations that we know.
—The disinterested man has gone abroad;
Winter is on the by-way where he rode
Erect and alone, summery years ago.
When we dream, paraphrase, analysis
Exhaust the crannies of the night. We stare,
Fresh sweat upon our foreheads, as they fade:
The melancholy and terror of avenues
Where long no single man has moved, but play
Under the arc-lights gangs of the grey dead
Running directionless. That bright blank place
Advances with us into fearful day,
Heady and insuppressible. Call in friends,
They grin and carry it carefully away,—
The fathers can’t be trusted,—strangers wear
Their strengths, and visor. Last, authority,
The Listener borrow from an English grave
To solve our hatred and our bitterness . .
The foul and absurd to solace or dismay.
All this will never appear; we will not say;
Let the evidence be buried in a cave
Off the main road. If anyone could see
The white scalp of that passionate will and those
Sullen desires, he would stumble, dumb,
Retreat into the time from which he came
Counting upon his fingers and his toes.
Farewell to Miles
We are to tell one man tonight good-bye.
Therefore in little glasses Scotch, therefore
Inane talk on the chaise longue by the door,
Therefore the loud man, the man small and shy
Who squats, the hostess as
she has a nut
Laughing like ancestor. Hard, hard to find
In thirteen bodies one appropriate mind,
It is hard to find a knife that we can cut.
The dog is wandering among the men
And wander may: who knows where who will be,
Under what master, in what company,
When what we hope for has not come again
For the last time? Schedules, nerves will crack
In the distortion of that ultimate loss;
Sad eyes at frenzied eyes will look across,
Blink, be resigned. The men then will come back.
How many of these are destined there? Not one
But may be there, staring; but some may trick
By attack or by some prodigy of luck
The sly dog. McPherson in the Chinese sun
May achieve the annihilation of his will;
The urbane and bitter Miles at Harvard may
Discover in time an acid holiday
And let the long wound of his birth lie still.
Possibilities, dreams, in a crowded room.
Fantasy for the academic man,
Release, distinction. Let the man who can,
Does any peace know, now arise and come
Out of the highballs, past the dog, forward.
(I hope you will be happier where you go
Than you or we were here, and learn to know
What satisfactions there are.) No one heard.
Wayne, 1940
The Moon and the Night and the Men
On the night of the Belgian surrender the moon rose
Late, a delayed moon, and a violent moon
For the English or the American beholder;
The French beholder. It was a cold night,
People put on their wraps, the troops were cold
No doubt, despite the calendar, no doubt
Numbers of refugees coughed, and the sight
Or sound of some killed others. A cold night.
On Outer Drive there was an accident:
A stupid well-intentioned man turned sharp
Right and abruptly he became an angel
Fingering an unfamiliar harp,
Or screamed in hell, or was nothing at all.
Do not imagine this is unimportant.
He was a part of the night, part of the land,
Part of the bitter and exhausted ground
Out of which memory grows.
Michael and I
Stared at each other over chess, and spoke
As little as possible, and drank and played.
The chessmen caught in the European eye,
Neither of us I think had a free look
Although the game was fair. The move one made
It was difficult at last to keep one’s mind on.
‘Hurt and unhappy’ said the man in London.
We said to each other, The time is coming near
When none shall have books or music, none his dear,
And only a fool will speak aloud his mind.
History is approaching a speechless end,
As Henry Adams said. Adams was right.
All this occurred on the night when Leopold
Fulfilled the treachery four years before
Begun—or was he well-intentioned, more
Roadmaker to hell than king? At any rate,
The moon came up late and the night was cold,
Many men died—although we know the fate
Of none, nor of anyone, and the war
Goes on, and the moon in the breast of man is cold.
White Feather
(after a news item)
Imagine a crowded war-time street
Down Under. See as little as I:
The woman gives him as they meet
Passing, something . . a feather. Try
To make out this man who was going by.
The eye stared at the feather.
He could remember sand and sand,
The punishing sun on their guns; he chose
As the men approached the western end
To move to the left. Who would suppose
A Lieutenant in civilian clothes?
The feather stared back.
He dropt his glass eye in her hand.
. . Humiliation or fantasy,
He thought; I have seen too much sand
For judgment or anger; it may be I,
All men, deserve the feather’s lie.
The eye stared at the feather.
The Enemies of the Angels
I
The Irish and the Italians own the place.
Anyone owns it, if you like, who has
A dollar minimum; but it is theirs by noise.
Let them possess it until one o’clock,
The balconies’ tiers, huddled tables, shroud-
ed baleful music, and the widening crack
Across the far wall watching a doomed crowd,
The fat girl simpering carnations to the boys.
This is a paradise the people seek,
To hide, if they but knew, being awake,
Losses and crisis. This is where they come
For love, for fun, to forget, dance, to conceal
Their slow perplexity by the river. Who
But pities the kissing couple? Who would feel
Disdain, as she does, being put on show
By whom she loves? And pity . . our images of home.
The arrival of the angels is delayed
An even minute, and I am afraid
We clapped because they fail to, not because
They come. Their wings are sorry. The platform
A little shudders as they back and frisk,
We’d maul the angels, the whole room is warm,—
A waste, and a creation without risk;
Jostling, pale as they vanish, the horse-faced chorine paws.
The impersonator is our special joy
And puzzle: did the nurse announce a boy
Or not? But now the guy is all things, all
Women and most men howl when he takes off
Our President, the Shadow, Garbo or Bing
And other marvellous persons. ‘Sister Rough’
The sailors at their table, gesturing,
Soprano, whistling. Still, recall him, and recall
Mimics we wish we all were, and we are.
We lack a subject just, we lack a car,
We would see two Mayors bowing as we pass,
We wish we had another suit, we wish
Another chance, we would have Western life
Where the hero reins and fans, horseflesh is flesh.
But the heckling man and his embarrassed wife
Play us across the mirrored room. Where is my glass?
II
My tall and singular friend two feet away,
Where do you go at the end of another day?
What is your lot, your wife’s lot, under the Lord?
If you between two certain ages, more
Nor less, are, and if you revere the Flag
Or whether, Friend, you find a flag a bore
And whether Democracy blooms or you see it sag,
What is your order number at your Local Board?
Where do you all go? Not with whom you would;
But where you went as little boys, when good,
To the plains’ heaven of the silver screen.
This comic in a greatcoat is your will,
The faery presence walking among men
Who mock him: sly, baffled, and powerful
For imagination is his, and imagination
Ruins, compels; consider the comedian again.
The orchestra returns and tunes before
A spot, a flash, the M. C. through the door
Glides like a breakfast to your vision—gay
Indelicate intimate, ‘Jerk, what do you know?’
An aging, brimstone acrobat in pink
Resists her? Who would be unkind to think
A human wheel, a frozen smile, is human woe?
Consider, students, at the convalescent hour
The fantasy which last week you saw fair,
Which loses now its eye; its eye is gone.
Where shall the ten be found to safe us? For
The enemies of the angels, hard on sleep,
Weary themselves to find the Gentlemen’s door.
It is not a little one. Perhaps you weep,
Three eyes weep in the world you inhabit alone.
All this resist. Who wish their stays away
Or wish them tighter tighter—the mourners pray
In narrowing circles—these are women lost,
Are men lost in the drag of women’s eyes,
Salt mouths. Go with the tide, at midnight dream
Hecklers will vanish like a radical’s lies,
And all Life slides from drink to drink, the stream
Slides, and under the stream we join a happy ghost.
A Poem for Bhain
Although the relatives in the summer house
Gossip and grumble, do what relatives do,
Demand, demand our eyes and ears, demand us,
You and I are not precisely there
As they require: heretics, we converse
Alert and alone, as over a lake of fire
Two white birds following their profession
Of flight, together fly, loom, fall and rise,
Certain of the nature and station of their mission.
So by the superficial and summer lake
We talk, and nothing that we say is heard,
Neither by the relatives who twitter and ache
Nor by any traveller nor by any bird.
Boston Common
A Meditation upon The Hero
I
Slumped under the impressive genitals
Of the bronze charger, protected by bronze,
By darkness from patrols, by sleep from what
Assailed him earlier and left him here,
The man lies. Clothing and organs. These were once
Shoes. Faint in the orange light
Flooding the portico above: the whole
Front of the State House. On a February night.
II
Dramatic bivouac for the casual man!
Beyond the exedra the Common falls,
Famous and dark, away; a lashing wind;
Immortal heroes in a marble frame
Who broke their bodies on Fort Wagner’s walls,
Robert Gould Shaw astride, and his
Negroes without name, who followed, who fell