77 Dream Songs Read online

  J.B.

  I

  1

  Huffy Henry hid the day,

  unappeasable Henry sulked.

  I see his point,—a trying to put things over.

  It was the thought that they thought

  they could do it made Henry wicked & away.

  But he should have come out and talked.

  All the world like a woolen lover

  once did seem on Henry’s side.

  Then came a departure.

  Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.

  I don’t see how Henry, pried

  open for all the world to see, survived.

  What he has now to say is a long

  wonder the world can bear & be.

  Once in a sycamore I was glad

  all at the top, and I sang.

  Hard on the land wears the strong sea

  and empty grows every bed.

  2

  Big Buttons, Cornets: the advance

  The jane is zoned! no nightspot here, no bar

  there, no sweet freeway, and no premises

  for business purposes,

  no loiterers or needers. Henry are

  baffled. Have ev’ybody head for Maine,

  utility-man take a train?

  Arrive a time when all coons lose dere grip,

  but is he come? Le’s do a hoedown, gal,

  one blue, one shuffle,

  if them is all you seem to réquire. Strip,

  ol banger, skip us we, sugar; so hang on

  one chaste evenin.

  —Sir Bones, or Galahad: astonishin

  yo legal & yo good. Is you feel well?

  Honey dusk do sprawl.

  —Hit’s hard. Kinged or thinged, though, fling & wing.

  Poll-cats are coming, hurrah, hurray.

  I votes in my hole.

  3

  A Stimulant for an Old Beast

  Acacia, burnt myrrh, velvet, pricky stings.

  —I’m not so young but not so very old,

  said screwed-up lovely 23.

  A final sense of being right out in the cold,

  unkissed.

  (—My psychiatrist can lick your psychiatrist.) Women get under things.

  All these old criminals sooner or later

  have had it. I’ve been reading old journals.

  Gottwald & Co., out of business now.

  Thick chests quit. Double agent, Joe.

  She holds her breath like a seal

  and is whiter & smoother.

  Rilke was a jerk.

  I admit his griefs & music

  & titled spelled all-disappointed ladies.

  A threshold worse than the circles

  where the vile settle & lurk,

  Rilke’s. As I said,—

  4

  Filling her compact & delicious body

  with chicken páprika, she glanced at me

  twice.

  Fainting with interest, I hungered back

  and only the fact of her husband & four other people

  kept me from springing on her

  or falling at her little feet and crying

  ‘You are the hottest one for years of night

  Henry’s dazed eyes

  have enjoyed, Brilliance.’ I advanced upon

  (despairing) my spumoni. —Sir Bones: is stuffed,

  de world, wif feeding girls.

  —Black hair, complexion Latin, jewelled eyes

  downcast … The slob beside her feasts … What wonders is

  she sitting on, over there?

  The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars.

  Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.

  —Mr. Bones: there is.

  5

  Henry sats in de bar & was odd,

  off in the glass from the glass,

  at odds wif de world & its god,

  his wife is a complete nothing,

  St Stephen

  getting even.

  Henry sats in de plane & was gay.

  Careful Henry nothing said aloud

  but where a Virgin out of cloud

  to her Mountain dropt in light,

  his thought made pockets & the plane buckt.

  ‘Parm me, lady.’ ‘Orright.’

  Henry lay in de netting, wild,

  while the brainfever bird did scales;

  Mr Heartbreak, the New Man,

  come to farm a crazy land;

  an image of the dead on the fingernail

  of a newborn child.

  6

  A Capital at Wells

  During the father’s walking—how he look

  down by now in soft boards, Henry, pass

  and what he feel or no, who know?—

  as during hís broad father’s, all the breaks

  & ill-lucks of a thriving pioneer

  back to the flying boy in mountain air,

  Vermont’s child to go out, and while Keats sweat’

  for hopeless inextricable lust, Henry’s fate,

  and Ethan Allen was a calling man,

  all through the blind one’s dream of the start,

  when Day was killing Porter and had to part

  lovers for ever, fancy if you can,

  while the cardinals’ guile to keep Aeneas out

  was failing, while in some hearts Chinese doubt

  inscrutably was growing, toward its end,

  and a starved lion by a water-hole

  clouded with gall, while Abelard was whole,

  these grapes of stone were being proffered, friend.

  7

  ‘The Prisoner of Shark Island’ with Paul Muni

  Henry is old, old; for Henry remembers

  Mr Deeds’ tuba, & the Cameo,

  & the race in Ben Hur,—The Lost World, with sound,

  & The Man from Blankley’s, which he did not dig,

  nor did he understand one caption of,

  bewildered Henry, while the Big Ones laughed.

  Now Henry is unmistakably a Big One.

  Fúnnee; he don’t féel so.

  He just stuck around.

  The German & the Russian films into

  Italian & Japanese films turned, while many

  were prevented from making it.

  He wishing he could squirm again where Hoot

  is just ahead of rustlers, where William S

  forgoes some deep advantage, & moves on,

  where Hashknife Hartley having the matter taped

  the rats are flying. For the rats

  have moved in, mostly, and this is for real.

  8

  The weather was fine. They took away his teeth,

  white & helpful; bothered his backhand;

  halved his green hair.

  They blew out his loves, his interests. ‘Underneath,’

  (they called in iron voices) ‘understand,

  is nothing. So there.’

  The weather was very fine. They lifted off

  his covers till he showed, and cringed & pled

  to see himself less.

  They installed mirrors till he flowed. ‘Enough’

  (murmured they) ‘if you will watch Us instead,

  yet you may saved be. Yes.’

  The weather fleured. They weakened all his eyes,

  and burning thumbs into his ears, and shook

  his hand like a notch.

  They flung long silent speeches. (Off the hook!)

  They sandpapered his plumpest hope. (So capsize.)

  They took away his crotch.

  9

  Deprived of his enemy, shrugged to a standstill

  horrible Henry, foaming. Fan their way

  toward him who will

  in the high wood: the officers, their rest,

  with p. a. echoing: his girl comes, say,

  conned in to test

  if he’s still human, see: she love him, see,

  therefore she get on the Sheriff’
s mike & howl

  ‘Come down, come down’.

  Therefore he un-budge, furious. He’d flee

  but only Heaven hangs over him foul.

  At the crossways, downtown,

  he dreams the folks are buying parsnips & suds

  and paying rent to foes. He slipt & fell.

  It’s golden here in the snow.

  A mild crack: a far rifle. Bogart’s duds

  truck back to Wardrobe. Fancy the brain from hell

  held out so long. Let go.

  10

  There were strange gatherings. A vote would come

  that would be no vote. There would come a rope.

  Yes. There would come a rope.

  Men have their hats down. “Dancing in the Dark”

  will see him up, car-radio-wise. So many, some

  won’t find a rut to park.

  It is in the administration of rhetoric,

  on these occasions, that—not the fathomless heart—

  the thinky death consists;

  his chest is pinched. The enemy are sick,

  and so is us of. Often, to rising trysts,

  like this one, drove he out

  and the gasps of love, after all, had got him ready.

  However things hurt, men hurt worse. He’s stark

  to be jerked onward?

  Yes. In the headlights he got’ keep him steady,

  leak not, look out over. This’ hard work,

  boss, wait’ for The Word.

  11

  His mother goes. The mother comes & goes.

  Chen Lung’s too came, came and crampt & then

  that dragoner’s mother was gone.

  It seem we don’t have no good bed to lie on,

  forever. While he drawing his first breath,

  while skinning his knees,

  while he was so beastly with love for Charlotte Coquet

  he skated up & down in front of her house

  wishing he could, sir, die,

  while being bullied & he dreamt he could fly—

  during irregular verbs—them world-sought bodies

  safe in the Arctic lay:

  Strindberg rocked in his niche, the great Andrée

  by muscled Fraenkel under what’s of the tent,

  torn like then limbs, by bears

  over fierce decades, harmless. Up in pairs

  go we not, but we have a good bed.

  I have said what I had to say.

  12

  Sabbath

  There is an eye, there was a slit.

  Nights walk, and confer on him fear.

  The strangler tree, the dancing mouse

  confound his vision; then they loosen it.

  Henry widens. How did Henry House

  himself ever come here?

  Nights run. Tes yeux bizarres me suivent

  when loth at landfall soft I leave.

  The soldiers, Coleridge Rilke Poe,

  shout commands I never heard.

  They march about, dying & absurd.

  Toddlers are taking over. O

  ver! Sabbath belling. Snoods converge

  on a weary-daring man.

  What now can be cleared up? from the Yard the visitors urge.

  Belle thro’ the graves in a blast of sun

  to the kirk moves the youngest witch.

  Watch.

  13

  God bless Henry. He lived like a rat,

  with a thatch of hair on his head

  in the beginning.

  Henry was not a coward. Much.

  He never deserted anything; instead

  he stuck, when things like pity were thinning.

  So may be Henry was a human being.

  Let’s investigate that.

  … We did; okay.

  He is a human American man.

  That’s true. My lass is braking.

  My brass is aching. Come & diminish me, & map my way.

  God’s Henry’s enemy. We’re in business … Why,

  what business must be clear.

  A cornering.

  I couldn’t feel more like it. —Mr Bones,

  as I look on the saffron sky,

  you strikes me as ornery.

  14

  Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.

  After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,

  we ourselves flash and yearn,

  and moreover my mother told me as a boy

  (repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored

  means you have no

  Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no

  inner resources, because I am heavy bored.

  Peoples bore me,

  literature bores me, especially great literature,

  Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes

  as bad as achilles,

  who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.

  And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag

  and somehow a dog

  has taken itself & its tail considerably away

  into mountains or sea or sky, leaving

  behind: me, wag.

  15

  Let us suppose, valleys & such ago,

  one pal unwinding from his labours in

  one bar of Chicago,

  and this did actual happen. This was so.

  And many graces are slipped, & many a sin

  even that laid man low

  but this will be remembered & told over,

  that she was heard at last, haughtful & greasy,

  to bawl in that low bar:

  ‘You can biff me, you can bang me, get it you’ll never.

  I may be only a Polack broad but I don’t lay easy.

  Kiss my ass, that’s what you are.’

  Women is better, braver. In a foehn of loss

  entire, which too they hotter understand,

  having had it,

  we struggle. Some hang heavy on the sauce,

  some invest in the past, one hides in the land.

  Henry was not his favourite.

  16

  Henry’s pelt was put on sundry walls

  where it did much resemble Henry and

  them persons was delighted.

  Especially his long & glowing tail

  by all them was admired, and visitors.

  They whistled: This is it!

  Golden, whilst your frozen daiquiris

  whir at midnight, gleams on you his fur

  & silky & black.

  Mission accomplished, pal.

  My molten yellow & moonless bag,

  drained, hangs at rest.

  Collect in the cold depths barracuda. Ay,

  in Sealdah Station some possessionless

  children survive to die.

  The Chinese communes hum. Two daiquiris

  withdrew into a corner of the gorgeous room

  and one told the other a lie.

  17

  Muttered Henry:—Lord of matter, thus:

  upon some more unquiet spirit knock,

  my madnesses have cease.

  All the quarter astonishes a lonely out & back.

  They set their clocks by Henry House,

  the steadiest man on the block.

  And Lucifer:—I smell you for my own,

  by smug. —What have I tossed you but the least

  (tho’ hard); fit for your ears.

  Your servant, bored with horror, sat alone

  with busy teeth while his dislike increased

  unto himself, in tears.

  And he:—O promising despair,

  in solitude— —End there.

  Your avenues are dying: leave me: I dove

  under the oaken arms of Brother Martin,

  St Simeon the Lesser Theologian,

  Bodhidharma, and the Baal Shem Tov.

  18

  A Strut for Roethke

  Westward, hit a low note, for a roarer lost

  across the Sound but north from Breme
rton,

  hit a way down note.

  And never cadenza again of flowers, or cost.

  Him who could really do that cleared his throat

  & staggered on.

  The bluebells, pool-shallows, saluted his over-needs,

  while the clouds growled, heh-heh, & snapped, & crashed.

  No stunt he’ll ever unflinch once more will fail

  (O lucky fellow, eh Bones?)—drifted off upstairs,

  downstairs, somewheres.

  No more daily, trying to hit the head on the nail:

  thirstless: without a think in his head:

  back from wherever, with it said.

  Hit a high long note, for a lover found

  needing a lower into friendlier ground

  to bug among worms no more

  around um jungles where ah blurt ‘What for?’

  Weeds, too, he favoured as most men don’t favour men.

  The Garden Master’s gone.

  19

  Here, whence

  all have departed or will do, here airless, where

  that witchy ball

  wanted, fought toward, dreamed of, all a green living

  drops limply into one’s hands

  without pleasure or interest

  Figurez-vous, a time swarms when the word

  ‘happy’ sheds its whole meaning, like to come and

  like for memory too

  That morning arrived to Henry as well a great cheque

  eaten out already by the Government & State &

  other strange matters

  Gentle friendly Henry Pussy-cat