John Berryman Read online

  With a white eye, who takes all things away,

  Comes and stares from the corner of my bed

  If I could turn. My nails and my hair loosen,

  The stiff flesh lurches and flows off like blood.

  Grateful the surf of death drawing back under

  (Offshore to fan out, vague and dark again)

  My legs, my decayed feet, cock and heart.

  If I were rid of them, somehow propped up . .

  My vivid brain alone with a little vermilion!

  The Pacifist’s Song

  I am the same yes as you others, only—

  (Also for mé the plain where I was born,

  Bore Her look, bear love, makes its mindless pull

  And matters in my throat, also for me

  The many-murdered sway my dreams unshorn,

  Bearded with woe, their eyes blasted and dull)

  Only I wake out of the vision of death

  And hear One whisper whether man or god

  ‘Kill not … Your ill from evil comes … Bear all’;—

  Only I must forsake my country’s wrath

  Who am earth’s citizen, must human blood

  Anywhere shed mourn, turning from it pale

  Back to the old and serious labour, to

  My restless labour under the vigilant stars,

  From whom no broad storm ever long me hides.

  What I try, doomed, is hard enough to do.

  We breed up in our own breast our worse wars

  Who long since sealed ourselves Hers Who abides.

  Surviving Love

  The clapper hovers, but why run so hard?

  What he wants, has,—more than will make him ease;

  No god calls down,—he’s not been on his knees

  This man, for years, and he is off his guard.

  What then does he dream of

  Sweating through day?—Surviving love.

  Cold he knows he comes, once to the dark,

  All that waste of cold, leaving all cold

  Behind him hearts, forgotten when he’s tolled,

  His books are split and sold, the pencil mark

  He made erased, his wife

  Gone brave & quick to her new life.

  And so he spins to find out something warm

  To think on when the glaze fastens his eyes

  And he begins to freeze. He slows and tries

  To hear a promise: ‘After, after your storm

  I will grieve and remember,

  Miss you and be warm and remember.’

  But really nothing replies to the poor man,

  He never hears this, or the voice he hears

  (He thinks) he loses ah when next appears

  The hood of the bell, seeing which he began.

  His skull rings with his end,

  He runs on, love for love.

  The Lightning

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

  Concealing it from her children, when I came.

  What I could, did, helpless with what I saw.

  Analysands all, and the rest ought to be,

  The friends my innocence cherished, and you and I,

  Darling,—the friends I qualm and cherish and see.

  . . The fattest nation!—wé do not thrive fat

  But facile in the scale with all we rise

  And shift a breakfast, and there is shame in that.

  And labour sweats with vice at the top, and two

  Bullies are bristling. What he thought who thinks?

  It is difficult to say what one will do.

  Obstinate, gleams from the black world the gay and fair,

  My love loves chocolate, she loves also me,

  And the lightning dances, but I cannot despair.

  V

  Rock-Study with Wanderer

  ‘Cold cold cold of a special night’

  Summer and winter sings under the beast

  The ravished doll Hear in the middle waste

  The blue doll of the west cracking with fright

  The music & the lights did not go out

  Alas Our foreign officers are gay

  Singers in the faery cities shiver & play

  Their exile dances through unrationed thought

  Waiting for the beginning of the end

  The wedding of the arms Whose charnel arms

  Will plough the emerald mathematical farms

  In spring, spring-flowers to the U. N. send?

  * * *

  Waiting I stroll within a summer wood

  Avoiding broken glass in the slant sun

  Our promises we may at last make good

  The stained glass shies when the cathedral’s won

  Certainly in a few years call it peace

  The arms & wings of peace patrol us all

  The planes & arms that planes & arms may cease

  Pathos (theanthropos) fills evenfall

  When shall the body of the State come near

  The body’s state stable & labile? When

  Irriding & resisting rage & fear

  Shall men in unison yet resemble men?

  Detroit our heart When terribly we move

  The sea is ours We walk upon the sea

  The air is ours Hegemony, my love,

  The good life’s founded upon LST

  The twilight birds wake A paralysis

  Is busy with societies and souls

  Whose gnarled & pain-wild bodies beg abyss

  Paraplegia dolorosa The world rolls

  A tired and old man resting on the grass

  His forehead loose as if he had put away

  Among the sun & the green & the young who pass

  The whole long fever of his passionate day

  . . To the dark watcher then an hour comes

  Neither past nor future, when the chuffing sea

  Far off like the rough of beast nearby succumbs

  And a kind of sleep spreads over rock & tree

  Nightshade not far from the abandoned tomb

  Hangs its still bells & fatal berries down

  The flowers dream Crags shadows loom

  The caresses of the animals are done

  Under faint moon they lie absorbed and fair

  Stricken their limbs flow in false attitudes

  Of love Dovetailed into a broken mirror

  Stained famous glass are, where the watcher broods

  All wars are civil So the thing will die

  Your civilization a glitter of great glass

  The lusts have shivered you are shaken by

  And step aside from in the moonlit grass

  Stare on, cold riot of the western mind

  Rockwalking man, what can a wanderer know?

  Rattle departing of his friend and kind

  And then (the widow sang) sphincter let go

  * * *

  Draw draw the curtain on a little life

  A filth a fairing Wood is darkening

  Where birdcall hovered now I hear no thing

  I hours since came from my love my wife

  Although a strange voice sometimes patiently

  Near in the air when I lie vague and weak

  As if it had a body tries to speak . .

  I must go back, she will be missing me

  Whether There Is Sorrow in the Demons

  Near the top a bad turn some dare. Well,

  The horse swerves and screams, his eyes pop,

  Feet feel air, the firm winds prop

  Jaws wide wider until

  Through great teeth rider greets the smiles of Hell.

  Thick night, where the host’s thews crack like thongs

  A welcome, curving abrupt on cheek & neck.

  No wing swings over once to check

  Lick of their fire’s tongues,

  Whip & chuckle, hoarse insulting songs.

  Powers immortal, fixed, intractable.

  Only the lost soul jerks whom they joy hang:

  Clap of remo
rse, and tang and fang

  More frightful than the drill

  An outsize dentist scatters down a skull;

  Nostalgia rips him swinging. Fast in malice

  How may his masters mourn, how ever yearn

  The frore pride wherein they burn?

  God’s fire. To what qui tollis

  Stone-tufted ears prick back towards the bright Palace?

  Whence Lucifer shone Lucifer’s friends hail

  The scourge of choice made at the point of light

  Destined into eternal night;

  Motionless to fulfil

  Their least, their envy looks up dense and pale.

  . . Repine blackmarket felons; murderers

  Sit still their time, till yellow feet go first,

  Dies soon in them, and can die, thirst;

  Not lives in these, nor years

  On years scar their despair—which yet rehearse . .

  Their belvedere is black. They believe, and quail.

  One shudder racks them only, lonely, and

  No mirror breaks at their command.

  Unsocketed, their will

  Grinds on their fate. So was, so shall be still.

  The Long Home

  bulks where the barley blew, time out of mind

  Of the sleepless Master. The barbered lawn

  Far to a grey wall lounges, the birds are still,

  Rising wind rucks from the sill

  The slack brocade beside the old throne he dreams on.

  The portraits’ hands are blind.

  Below these frames they strain on stones. He mumbles . .

  Fathers who listen, what loves hear

  Surfacing from the lightless past? He foams.

  Stillness locks a hundred rooms.

  Louts in a bar aloud, The People, sucking beer.

  A barefoot kiss. Who trembles?

  Peach-bloom, sorb-apple sucked in what fine year!

  I am a wine, he wonders; when?

  Am I what I can do? My large white hands.

  Boater & ascot, in grandstands

  Coups. Concentrations of frightful cold, and then

  Warm limbs below a pier.

  The Master is sipping his identity.

  Ardours & stars! Trash humped on trash.

  The incorporated yacht, the campaign cheque

  Signed one fall on the foredeck

  Hard on a quarrel, to amaze the fool. Who brash

  Hectored out some false plea?

  Brownpaper-blind, his morning passions trailed

  Home in the clumsy dusk,—how now

  Care which from which, trapped on a racing star

  Where we know not who we are! . .

  The whipcord frenzy curls, he slouches where his brow

  Works like the rivals’ failed.

  Of six young men he flew to breakfast as,

  Only the magpie, rapist, stayed

  For dinner, and the rapist died, so that

  Not the magpie but the cat

  Vigil upon the magpie stalks, sulky parade,

  Great tail switching like jazz.

  Frightened, dying to fly, pied and obscene,

  He blinks his own fantastic watch

  For the indolent Spring of what he was before;

  A stipple of sunlight, clouded o’er,

  Remorse a scribble on the magic tablet which

  A schoolboy thumb jerks clean.

  Heat lightning straddles the horizon dusk

  Above the yews: the fresh wind blows:

  He flicks a station on by the throne-side . .

  Out in the wide world, Kitty—wide

  Night—far across the sea . . Some guardian accent grows

  Below the soft voice, brusque:

  ‘You are: not what you wished but what you were,

  The decades’ vise your gavel brands,

  You glare the god who gobbled his own fruit,

  He who stood mute, lucid and mute,

  Under peine forte et dure to will his bloody lands,

  Then whirled down without heir.’

  The end of which he will not know. Undried,

  A prune-skin helpless on his roof.

  His skin gleams in the lamplight dull as gold

  And old gold clusters like mould

  Stifling about his blood, time’s helm to build him proof.

  Thump the oak, and preside!

  An ingrown terrible smile unflowers, a sigh

  Blurs, the axle turns, unmanned.

  Habited now forever with his weight

  Well-housed, he rolls in the twilight

  Unrecognizable against the world’s rim, and

  A bird whistles nearby.

  Whisked off, a voice, fainter, faint, a guise,

  A gleam, pin of a, a. Nothing.

  —One look round last, like rats, before we leave.

  A famous house. Now the men arrive:

  Horror, they swing their cold bright mallets, they’re breaking

  Him up before my eyes!

  Wicked vistas! The wolves mourn for our crime

  Out past the grey wall. On to our home,

  Whereby the barley may seed and resume.

  Mutter of thrust stones palls this room,

  The crash of mallets. He is going where I come.

  Barefoot soul fringed with rime.

  A Winter-Piece to a Friend Away

  Your letter came.—Glutted the earth & cold

  With rains long heavy, follows intense frost;

  Snow howls and hides the world

  We workt awhile to build; all the roads are lost;

  Icy spiculae float, filling strange air;

  No voice goes far; one is alone whirling since where,

  And when was it one crossed?

  You have been there.

  I too the breaking blizzard’s eddies bore

  One year, another year: tempted to drop

  At my own feet forlorn

  Under the warm fall, frantic more to chop

  Wide with the gale until my thought ran numb

  Clenching the blue skin tight against what white spikes come.

  And the sick brain estop.

  Your pendulum

  Mine, not stilled wholly, has been sorry for,

  Weeps from, and would instruct . . Unless I lied

  What word steadies that cord?

  Glade grove & ghyll of antique childhood glide

  Off; from our grown grief, weathers that appal,

  The massive sorrow of the mental hospital,

  Friends & our good friends hide.

  They came to call.

  Hardly theirs, moment when the tempest gains,

  Loose heart convulses. Their hearts bend off dry,

  Their fruit dangles and fades.

  —Solicitudes of the orchard heart, comply

  A little with my longing, a little sing

  Our sorrow among steel & glass, our stiffening,

  That hers may modify:

  O trembling Spring.—

  Immortal risks our sort run, to a house

  Reported in a wood . . mould upon bread

  And brain, breath giving out,

  From farms we go by, barking, and shaken head,

  The shrunk pears hang, Hölderlin’s weathercock

  Rattles to tireless wind, the fireless landscape rock,

  Artists insane and dead

  Strike like a clock:

  If the fruit is dead, fast. Wait. Chafe your left wrist.

  All these too lie, whither a true form strays.

  Sweet when the lost arrive.

  Foul sleet ices the twigs, the vision frays,

  Festoons all signs; still as I come to name

  My joy to you my joy springs up again the same,—

  The thaw alone delays,—

  Your letter came!

  New Year’s Eve

  The grey girl who had not been singing stopped,

  And a brave new no-sound blew through acrid air.

&n
bsp; I set my drink down, hard. Somebody slapped

  Somebody’s second wife somewhere,

  Wheeling away to long to be alone.

  I see the dragon of years is almost done,

  Its claws loosen, its eyes

  Crust now with tears & lust and a scale of lies.

  A whisky-listless and excessive saint

  Was expounding his position, whom I hung

  Boy-glad in glowing heaven: he grows faint:

  Hearing what song the sirens sung,

  Sidelong he web-slid and some rich prose spun.

  The tissue golden of the gifts undone

  Surpassed the gifts. Miss Weirs

  Whispers to me her international fears.

  Intelligentsia milling. In a semi-German

  (Our loss of Latin fractured how far our fate,—

  Disinterested once, linkage once like a sermon)

  I struggle to articulate

  Why it is our promise breaks in pieces early.

  The Muses’ visitants come soon, go surly

  With liquor & mirrors away

  In this land wealthy & casual as a holiday.

  Whom the Bitch winks at. Most of us are linsey-

  woolsey workmen, grandiose, and slack.

  On m’analyse, the key to secrets. Kinsey

  Shortly will tell us sharply back

  Habits we stuttered. How revive to join

  (Great evils grieve beneath : eye Caesar’s coin)

  And lure a while more home

  The vivid wanderers, uneasy with our shame?

  Priests of the infinite! ah, not for long.

  The dove whispers, and diminishes

  Up the blue leagues. And no doubt we heard wrong—

  Wax of our lives collects & dulls; but was

  What we heard hurried as we memorized,

  Or brightened, or adjusted? Undisguised

  We pray our tongues & fingers

  Record the strange word that blows suddenly and lingers.

  Imagine a patience in the works of love

  Luck sometimes visits. Ages we have sighed,

  And cleave more sternly to a music of

  Even this sore word ‘genocide’.

  Each to his own! Clockless & thankless dream

  And labour Makers, being what we seem.

  Soon soon enough we turn

  Our tools in; brownshirt Time chiefly our works will burn.

  I remember: white fine flour everywhere whirled

  Ceaselessly, wheels rolled, a slow thunder boomed,

  And there were snowy men in the mill-world

  With sparkling eyes, light hair uncombed,

  And one of them was humming an old song,

  Sack upon sack grew portly, until strong