The Heart Is Strange: New Selected Poems Read online

Doge followed Doge down down, the city floated.

  Vassals drencht maps.

  Fat popes & emperors to the high altar, hates

  soothed into peace here. Nothing went unnoted

  by the Patriarch perhaps

  for a thousand years, when Henry struck his forehead

  over his strange eyes & his monstrous beard

  ah-ing ‘This is too much.’

  Canal smell, the Byzantine beauty of the dead,

  with lovers arm in arm by the basin, weird

  to Henry as such.

  Gulls chains voices bells: honey we’re home.

  I don’t care whether they cremate Henry or not.

  His labour of travel is done

  He came upon some shore one time like foam

  but had to set out again or rot

  with his life on him like a ton.

  Unlike this feverish voyaging where new facts turned up

  hourly, monthly, among stale voyagers

  mostly American

  loud rich & rude & petty, whom God also will call to a stop

  without the languages, bitches without their curs.

  Rats across the Quai Voltaire run, can

  frighten you honey at dusk or an Arab Street:

  we knew that: Henry had the wit to be afraid

  and so my dear love were you.

  The ship bangs in. We relax in defeat,

  stiffen to the new acquaintances to be made

  & the sky over our graves is blue.

  Henry under construction was Henry indeed:

  gigantic cranes faltered under the load,

  spark-showers from the welding played

  with daylight, crew after crew

  replaced each other like Kings, all done anew

  Daily, to the horror of the gathering crowd

  which gazed in a silence of awe or sobbed aloud.

  The structure huge mounted apace. Some sang,

  others in prayer knelt; when the western wing

  was added, one vast sigh

  arose & made its way into the earless sky.

  Lifts were installed, many had their ashes hauled.

  Parents in the throng looked down appalled,

  In the end the mighty roof was hoisted on.

  The event transpired throughout the city at dawn,

  foot upon violent foot

  converged to shining Henry in the risen sun,

  question tormented the multitude one by one

  to see to what use it would now be put.

  Long (my dear) ago, when rosaries

  based Henry’s vaulting thought, at seven & six,

  Henry perceived in the sky

  your form amidst his stars. He fought to please

  you & God daily. Seldom wicked tricks

  surfaced into his I.

  Malice remained, in this man, moribund

  unto this hour and even at this hour

  it’s sleepy & can’t bother.

  Let demons do. But evils other conned

  Henry sufficiently to blot or sour

  your forms & the form of Father.

  I was the altar-boy he depended on

  on freezing twilit mornings, after good dreams.

  Since when my dreams have changed.

  Could Father wrong occurred to Henry gone

  fearful, grown. Out of the world of seems

  our death has us estranged.

  20/21 Feb 68 (second) 1:50 a.m.

  With arms outflung the clock announced: Ten-twenty.

  Dozens of demons sprang & preyed on Henry.

  All on a heavy morning.

  The baby was ill, the sky was dark, the I

  was Id, somebody put the sky on like a lid,

  somebody who is not returning.

  Oh we’ll wait. After all, after all.

  The Doubter & the rest. They rested all,

  on the night of the crucifying.

  Perhaps their dreams were something truly remarkable.

  Perhaps their dreams had what to do with his dying—

  but that was very lonely.

  Haldol & Serax, phenobarbital,

  Vivactil, by day; by deep night Tuinal

  & Thorazine,

  kept Henry going, like a natural man.

  I’m waiting for them to work, as sometimes they can,

  honey, in the bloodstream.

  June 68

  Good words & irreplaceable: serenade, schadenfreude,

  angst & malheur, we need them, we bow to them:

  what raving genius

  in our past coined such wisdom? I cannot know.

  Nor can you, my deep dear. You cannot know.

  They were ineffable.

  Who coined despair? I hope you never hear,

  my lovely dear, of any such goddamned thing.

  Set it up on a post

  and ax the post down while the angels sing,

  & bury the stenchful body loud & clear

  with an appropriate toast.

  Who made you up? That was a thin disguise:

  the soul shows through. You are my honey dear.

  Come, come & live with me.

  I can deal with everything but your eyes

  in tears—tears I invented & put there,

  during our mystery.

  24 June 68

  I’m reading my book backward. It sounds odd.

  It came twenty minutes ago. The hell with god.

  A student just called up

  about a grade earlier in the year.

  The hell with students. And my mother (‘Mir’)

  did the indexes to this book.

  There’s madness in the book. And sanenesses,

  he argued. Ha! It’s all a matter of

  control (& so forth) of the subject.

  The subject? Henry House & his troubles, yes

  with his wife & mother & baby, yes

  we’re now at the end, enough.

  A human personality, that’s impossible.

  The lines of nature & of will, that’s impossible.

  I give the whole thing up.

  Only there resides a living voice

  which if we can make we make it out of choice

  not giving the whole thing up.

  Phase Four

  I will begin by mentioning the word

  ‘Surrender’—that’s the 4th & final phase.

  The word. What is the thing, well, must be known

  in Heaven. ‘Acceptance’ is the phase before;

  if after finite struggle, infinite aid,

  ever you come there, friend,

  remember backward me lost in defiance,

  as I remember those admitting & complying.

  We cannot tell the truth, it’s not in us.

  That truth comes hard. O I am fighting it,

  my Weapon One: I know I cannot win,

  and half the war is lost, that’s to say won.

  The rest is for the blessed. The rest is bells

  at sundown off across a dozen lawns,

  a lake, two strands of laurel, where they come

  out of phase three mild toward the sacristy.

  Epilogue

  (1942)

  Epilogue

  He died in December. He must descend

  Somewhere, vague and cold, the spirit and seal,

  The gift descend, and all that insight fail

  Somewhere. Imagination one’s one friend

  Cannot see there. Both of us at the end.

  Nouns, verbs do not exist for what I feel.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX OF FIRST LINES

  INDEX OF TITLES

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank April Bernard, Henri Cole, Philip Coleman, Jonathan Galassi, David Godwin, John Haffenden, Michael Hofmann, Miranda Popkey, Charles Thornbury, and very especially Kate Donahue.

  Index of First Lines

  The index that appears in the print version of this title does not match the page
s in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

  A hurdle of water, and O these waters are cold

  A is for awful, which things are;

  (a layman’s winter mockup, wherein moreover

  A thing O say a sixteenth of an inch

  According to Thy will: That this day only

  After a little I could not have told—

  After a Stoic, a Peripatetic, a Pythagorean,

  Although the relatives in the summer house

  Amplitude,—voltage,—the one friend calls for the one,

  ‘and something that … that is theirs—no longer ours’

  And the Americans put Pound in a cage

  At twenty-five a man is on his way.

  Aware to the dry throat of the wide hell in the world

  Bitter upon conviction

  Blue go up & blue go down

  bulks where the barley blew, time out of mind

  Canal smell. City that lies on the sea like a cork

  Damned. Lost & damned. And I find I’m pregnant.

  Dog-tired, suisired, will now my body down

  Dream in a dream the heavy soul somewhere

  Edgy, perhaps. Not on the point of bursting-forth,

  Fearful I peer upon the mountain path

  Feel for your bad fall how could I fail,

  For all his vehemence & hydraulic opinions

  Germanicus leapt upon the wild lion in Smyrna,

  Good words & irreplaceable: serenade, schadenfreude,

  Gulls chains voices bells: honey we’re home.

  He died in December. He must descend

  He was reading late, at Richard’s, down in Maine,

  Henry under construction was Henry indeed:

  Henry’s nocturnal habits were the terror of his women.

  Here’s one who wants them hanged. A poor sick mind,

  High noon has me pitchblack, so in hope out,

  Holy, & holy. The damned are said to say

  Holy, as I suppose I dare to call you,

  Hospital racket, nurses’ iron smiles.

  I don’t know what the hell happened all that summer.

  I put those things there.—See them burn.

  I remind myself at that time of Plato’s uterus—

  I thought I’d say a thing to please myself

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

  I will begin by mentioning the word

  I would at this late hour as little as may be

  ‘If I had said out passions as they were,’

  If I say Thy name, art Thou there? It may be so.

  I’m reading my book backward. It sounds odd.

  In my serpentine researches

  It seems to be DARK all the time.

  Let us rejoice on our cots, for His nocturnal miracles

  Long (my dear) ago, when rosaries

  Lover & child, a little sing.

  Man with a tail heads eastward for the Fair.

  Master of beauty, craftsman of the snowflake,

  My intense friend was tall & strongly made,

  O a little lonely in Cambridge that first Fall

  O when I grunted, over lines and her,

  Occludes wild dawn. Up thro’ green ragged clouds

  Oh half as fearful for the yawning day

  On the night of the Belgian surrender the moon rose

  Problem. I cannot come among Your saints,

  (. . rabid or dog-dull.) Let me tell you how

  Sick with the lightning lay my sister-in-law,

  Sole watchman of the flying stars, guard me,

  Summoned from offices and homes, we came.

  Surprise me on some ordinary day

  The fireflies and the stars our only light,

  The first signs of the death of the boom came in the summer,

  The Governor your husband lived so long

  The grey girl who had not been singing stopped,

  The history of strangers in their dreams

  The round and smooth, my body in my bath,

  The sun rushed up the sky; the taxi flew;

  The three men coming down the winter hill

  The tree before my eyes bloomed into flame,

  They pointed me out on the highway, and they said

  This afternoon, discomfortable dead

  Thou hard. I will be blunt: Like widening

  Took my leave (last) five times before the end

  Under new management, Your Majesty:

  Vanity! hog-vanity, ape-lust

  What is the boy now, who has lost his ball,

  Who am I worthless that You spent such pains

  With arms outflung the clock announced: Ten-twenty.

  Your letter came.—Glutted the earth & cold

  ‘You’ve got to cross that lonesome valley’ and

  Index of Titles

  The index that appears in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

  “A Poem for Bhain,”

  “A Point of Age, Part I,”

  “A Sympathy, A Welcome,”

  “A Usual Prayer,”

  “A Winter-Piece to a Friend Away,”

  “American Lights, Seen From Off Abroad,”

  “Cadenza on Garnette,”

  “Canto Amor,”

  “Damn You, Jim D., You Woke Me Up,”

  “Damned,”

  “Desire Is a World by Night,”

  “Despair,”

  “Eleven Addresses to the Lord,”

  “Epilogue,”

  “Formal Elegy,”

  “Freshman Blues,”

  from “The Black Book (iii),”

  “Henry by Night,”

  “Henry’s Understanding,”

  “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet,”

  “‘How Do You Do, Dr Berryman, Sir?’,”

  “Images of Elspeth,”

  “In Memoriam (1914–1953),”

  “King David Dances,”

  “Message,”

  “Mr. Pou & the Alphabet—which he do not like,”

  “New Year’s Eve,”

  “Olympus,”

  “Opus Dei,”

  “Lauds,”

  “Matins,”

  “Prime,”

  “Interstitial Office,”

  “Terce,”

  “Sext,”

  “Nones,”

  “Vespers,”

  “Compline,”

  “Parting as Descent,”

  “Phase Four,”

  “Recovery,”

  “Tampa Stomp,”

  “The Animal Trainer (2),”

  “The Ball Poem,”

  “The Cage,”

  “The Disciple,”

  “The Dispossessed,”

  “The Handshake, The Entrance,”

  “The Hell Poem,”

  “The Heroes,”

  “The Lightning,”

  “The Long Home,”

  “The Minnesota and the Letter-Writers,”

  “The Moon and the Night and the Men,”

  “The Nervous Songs,”

  “Young Woman’s Song,”

  “The Song of the Demented Priest,”

  “A Professor’s Song,”

  “The Captain’s Song,”

  “The Song of the Tortured Girl,”

  “The Poet’s Final Instructions,”

  “The Possessed,”

  “The Spinning Heart,”

  “The Traveller,”

  “They Have,”

  “Transit,”

  “Two Organs,”

  “Winter Landscape,”

  “World-Telegram,”

  ALSO BY JOHN BERRYMAN

  POETRY

  Poems (1942)

>   The Dispossessed (1948)

  Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956)

  His Thought Made Pockets & The Plane Buckt (1958)

  77 Dream Songs (1964)

  Berryman’s Sonnets (1967)

  Short Poems (1967)

  Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and Other Poems (1968)

  His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968)

  The Dream Songs (1969)

  Love & Fame (1970)

  Delusions, Etc. (1972)

  Henry’s Fate & Other Poems, 1967–1972 (1977)

  Collected Poems 1937–1971 (1989)

  PROSE

  Stephen Crane: A Critical Biography (1950)

  The Arts of Reading (with Ralph Ross and Allen Tate) (1960)

  Recovery (1973)

  The Freedom of the Poet (1976)

  Berryman’s Shakespeare (1999)

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 2014 by Kathleen Berryman Donahue

  Introduction and selection copyright © 2014 by Daniel Swift

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2014

  eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Berryman, John, 1914–1972.

  [Poems, Selections.]

  The heart is strange: new selected poems / John Berryman; edited with an introduction by Daniel Swift. — First edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-374-22108-9 (hardback)

  I. Swift, Daniel, 1977– II. Title.

  PS3503.E744A6 2014

  811'.54—dc23

  2014004039

  www.fsgbooks.com

  www.twitter.com/fsgbooks • www.facebook.com/fsgbooks

  eISBN 9780374713591