Berryman's Sonnets Read online

And poor Mr Eliot and the Admiral

  Have come, and a damned word nobody can hear.

  Two centuries here have been abused our youth:

  (Your grey eyes pierce the miles to meet my eyes)

  The bicentennial of an affair with truth

  (In the southern noon whom do you tyrannize?)

  Not turned out well: the cast girl sucks her tooth.

  (Secret, let us be true time crucifies.)

  [ 21 ]

  Whom undone David into the dire van sent

  I’d see as far. I can’t dislike that man,

  Grievously and intensely like him even,

  Envy nor jealousy admit, consent

  Neither to the night of rustlers I frequent

  Nor to this illness dreams them; but I can,

  Only, that which we must: bright as a pan

  Our love gleams, empty almost empty—lent.

  . . Did he, or not, see? I stood close to you

  But our lips had broken and you could reply . .

  And is he clement? does he give us rope?

  It is the owner drives one crazy, who

  Came, or luck brought him, first; a police spy;

  A kind and good man; with a gun; hunts hope.

  [ 22 ]

  If not white shorts—then in a princess gown

  Where gaslights pierce the mist I’d have your age,

  Young in a grey gown, blonde and royal, rage

  Of handlebars at Reisenweber’s, frown

  Or smile to quell or rally half the town,

  To polka partners mad, to flout the stage,

  To pale The Lily to an average

  Woman, looking up from your champagne, or down.

  Myself, ascotted, still dumb as a mome

  Drinking your eyes . . No Bill comes by to cadge

  A Scotch in Rector’s, waving his loose tongue.

  I tip my skimmer to your friend who clung

  Too long, blue-stocking cracked on the Red Badge

  Stevie’s becoming known for . . We drive home.

  [ 23 ]

  They may suppose, because I would not cloy your ear—

  If ever these songs by other ears are heard—

  With ‘love’ and ‘love’, I loved you not, but blurred

  Lust with strange images, warm, not quite sincere,

  To switch a bedroom black. O mutineer

  With me against these empty captains! gird

  Your scorn again above all at this word

  Pompous and vague on the stump of his career.

  Also I fox ‘heart’, striking a modern breast

  Hollow as a drum, and ‘beauty’ I taboo;

  I want a verse fresh as a bubble breaks,

  As little false … Blood of my sweet unrest

  Runs all the same—I am in love with you—

  Trapped in my rib-cage something throes and aches!

  [ 24 ]

  Still it pleads and rankles: ‘Why do you love me?’

  Replies then jammed me dumb; but now I speak,

  Singing why each should not the other seek—

  The octet will be weaker—in the fishful sea.

  Your friends I don’t like all, and poetry

  You less than music stir to, the blue streak

  Troubles me you drink: if all these are weak

  Objections, they are all, and all I foresee.

  Your choice, though! . . Who no Goliath has slung low.

  When one day rushing about your lawn you saw

  Him whom I might not name without some awe

  If curious Johnson should enquire below,

  ‘Who lifts this voice harsh, fresh, and beautiful?’

  —‘As thy soul liveth, O king, I cannot tell.’

  [ 25 ]

  Sometimes the night echoes to prideless wailing

  Low as I hunch home late and fever-tired,

  Near you not, nearing the sharer I desired,

  Toward whom till now I sailed back; but that sailing

  Yaws, from the cabin orders like a failing

  Dribble, the stores disordered and then fired

  Skid wild, the men are glaring, the mate has wired

  Hopeless: locked in, and humming, the Captain’s nailing

  A false log to the lurching table. Lies

  And passion sing in the cabin on the voyage home,

  The burgee should fly Jolly Roger: wind

  Madness like the tackle of a crane (outcries

  Ascend) around to heave him from the foam

  Irresponsible, since all the stars rain blind.

  [ 26 ]

  Crouched on a low ridge sloping to where you pour

  No doubt a new drink late this easy night,

  The tooth-drawn town dreams . . censorless, can bite

  Rebellion, bodies mauled . . but breaks a snore.

  Hessians maraud no more, coaches no more

  Crash off north, south; only a smooth car’s flight

  Hums where the brains rest, an old parasite

  Sniff then for breakfast while from Bach you soar

  Easy and live in the summer dawn, my striker!

  Nothing the borough lets be made here, lest

  The professors and the millionaires from bed

  Be startled, the Negroes drop trays, build. The tiger

  Sprang off heraldic colours into the West,

  Where he snoozes . . glossy, and substantially dead.

  [ 27 ]

  In a poem made by Cummings, long since, his

  Girl was the rain, but darling you are sunlight

  Volleying down blue air, waking a flight

  Of sighs to follow like the mourning iris

  Your shining-out-of-shadow hair I miss

  A fortnight and to-noon. What you excite

  You are, you are me: as light’s parasite

  For vision on . . us. O if my syncrisis

  Teases you, briefer than Propertius’ in

  This paraphrase by Pound—to whom I owe

  Three letters—why, run through me like a comb:

  I lie down flat! under your discipline

  I die. No doubt of visored others, though . .

  The broad sky dumb with stars shadows me home.

  [ 28 ]

  A wasp skims nearby up the bright warm air,

  Immobile me, my poem of you lost

  Into your image burning, a burning ghost

  Between the bricks and fixed eyes, blue despair

  To spell you lively in this summerfare

  Back from your death of distance, my lute tossed

  Down, while my ears reel to your marriage, crossed

  Brass endless, burning on my helpless glare.

  After eighteen years to the Rue Fortunée

  Balzac brought Hanska, the Count dead and the lover

  Not well to live, home, where the black lock stuck

  Stuck! stuck! lights blazed, the crazy valet smashed away,

  Idlers assembled, a smith ran to discover—

  Ten weeks, and then turned in (like mine) his luck.

  [ 29 ]

  The cold rewards trail in, when the man is blind

  They glitter round his tomb (no bivouac) :

  The Rue Fortunée is the Rue de Balzac,

  The Bach-Gesellschaft girdles the world; unsigned,

  The treaty rages freeing him to wind

  Mankind about an icy finger. Pack

  His laurel in, startle him with gimcrack

  Recognition.—But O do not remind

  Of the hours of morning this indifferent man

  When alone in a summery cloud he sweat and knew

  She, she would not come, she would not come, now

  Or all the lime-slow day … Your artisan

  And men’s, I tarry alike for fame and you,

  Not hoping, tame, tapping my warm blank brow.

  [ 30 ]

  Of all that weeks-long day, though call it back

  If I will I can—rain thrice, sheets, a torrent<
br />
  Spaced by the dry sun, Sunday thirst that went

  Sharp-set from town to town, down cul-de-sac

  To smoke a blind pig for a liquid snack,

  Did ever beer taste better, when opulent

  Over the State line with the State’s consent

  We cleared our four throats, climbing off the rack;

  Lost our way then: our thirst again: then tea

  With a velvet jacket over the flowered choker

  Almost a man, who copied tulips queerer:

  Dinner a triumph—of that day I have wholly

  One moment (weeks I played the friendly joker)

  Your eyes married to mine in the car mirror.

  [ 31 ]

  Troubling are masks . . the faces of friends, my face

  Met unawares and your face: where I mum

  Your doubleganger writhes, wraiths are we come

  To keep a festival, none but wraiths embrace;

  Our loyal rite only we interlace,

  Laertes’ winding-sheet done and undone

  In Ithaca by day and night . . we thrum

  Hopeful our shuffles, trusting to our disgrace.

  Impostors . . O but our truth our fortunes cup

  To flash this lying blood. Sore and austere

  The crown we cry for, merely to lie ill

  In grand evasion, questions not come up.—

  I am dreaming on the hour when I can hear

  My last lie rattle, and then lie truly still.

  [ 32 ]

  How can I sing, western & dry & thin,

  You who for celebration should cause flow

  The sensual fanfare of D’Annunzio,

  Mozart’s mischievous joy, the amaranthine

  Mild quirks of Marvell, Villon sharp as tin

  Solid as sword-death when the man blinks slow

  And accordions into the form he’ll know

  Forever—voices can nearly make me sin

  With envy, so they sound. You they saw not,

  Natheless, alas, unto this epigone

  Descends the dread labour, the Olympic hour—

  When for the garden and the tape of what

  We trust, one runs until lung into bone

  Hardens, runs harder then . . lucky, a flower.

  [ 33 ]

  Audacities and fêtes of the drunken weeks!

  One step false pitches all down . . come and pour

  Another . . Strange, warningless we four

  Locked, crocked together, two of us made sneaks—

  Who can’t get at each other—midnights of freaks

  On crepitant surfaces, a kiss blind from the door . .

  One head suspects, drooping and vaguely sore,

  Something entirely sad, skew, she not seeks . .

  ‘You’ll give me ulcers if all this keeps up’

  You moaned . . One only, ignorant and kind,

  Saves his own life useful and usual,

  Blind to the witch-antinomy I sup

  Spinning between the laws on the black edge, blind

  Head—O do I?—I dance to disannul.

  [ 34 ]

  ‘I couldn’t leave you’ you confessed next day.

  Our law too binds. Grossly however bound

  And jacketed apart, ensample-wound,

  We come so little and can so little stay

  Together, what can we know? Anything may

  Amaze me: this did. Ah, to work underground

  Slowly and wholly in your vein profound . .

  Or like some outcast ancient Jew to say:

  ‘There is Judaea: in it Jerusalem:

  In that the Temple: in the Temple’s inmost

  Holy of holies hides the invisible Ark—

  There nothing—there all—vast wing beating dark—

  Voiceless, the terrible I AM—the lost

  Tables of stone with the Law graved on them!’

  [ 35 ]

  Nothing there? nothing up the sky alive,

  Invisibly considering? . . I wonder.

  Sometimes I heard Him in traditional thunder;

  Sometimes in sweet rain, or in a great ’plane, I’ve

  Concluded that I heard Him not. You thrive

  So, where I pine. See no adjustment blunder?

  Job was alone with Satan? Job? O under

  Hell-ladled morning, some of my hopes revive:

  . . Less nakedly malign—loblolly—dull

  Eyes on our end . . a table crumples, things

  Jump and fuse, a fat voice calls down the sky,

  ‘Too excitable! too sensitive! thin-skull,

  I am for you: I shrive your wanderings:

  Stand closer, evil, till I pluck your sigh.’

  [ 36 ]

  Keep your eyes open when you kiss: do: when

  You kiss. All silly time else, close them to;

  Unsleeping, I implore you (dear) pursue

  In darkness me, as I do you again

  Instantly we part . . only me both then

  And when your fingers fall, let there be two

  Only, ‘in that dream-kingdom’: I would have you

  Me alone recognize your citizen.

  Before who wanted eyes, making love, so?

  I do now. However we are driven and hide,

  What state we keep all other states condemn,

  We see ourselves, we watch the solemn glow

  Of empty courts we kiss in . . Open wide!

  You do, you do, and I look into them.

  [ 37 ]

  Sigh as it ends … I keep an eye on your

  Amour with Scotch,—too cher to consummate;

  Faster your disappearing beer than late-

  ly mine; your naked passion for the floor;

  Your hollow leg; your hanker for one more

  Dark as the Sundam Trench; how you dilate

  Upon psychotics of this class, collate

  Stages, and . . how long since you, well, forbore.

  Ah, but the high fire sings on to be fed

  Whipping our darkness by the lifting sea

  A while, O darling drinking like a clock.

  The tide comes on: spare, Time, from what you spread

  Her story,—tilting a frozen Daiquiri,

  Blonde, barefoot, beautiful,

  flat on the bare floor rivetted to Bach.

  [ 38 ]

  Musculatures and skulls. Later some throng

  Before a colonnade, eagle on goose

  Clampt in an empty sky, time’s mild abuse

  In cracks clear down the fresco print; among

  The exaggeration of poses and the long

  Dogged perspective, difficult to choose

  The half-forgotten painter’s lost excuse:

  A vanished poet crowned by the Duke for song.

  Yours crownless, though he keep four hundred years

  To be mocked so, will not be sorry if

  Some of you keeps, grey eyes, your dulcet lust . .

  So the old fiction fools us on, Hope steers

  Rather us lickerish towards some hieroglyph

  Than whelms us home, loinless and sleepy dust.

  [ 39 ]

  And does the old wound shudder open? Shall

  I nurse again my days to a girl’s sight,

  Feeling the bandaged and unquiet night

  Slide? Writhe in silly ecstasy? Banal

  Greetings rehearse till a quotidian drawl

  Carols a promise? Stoop an acolyte

  Who stood my master? Must my blood flow bright,

  Childish, I chilled and darkened? Strong pulse crawl?

  I see I do, it must, trembling I see

  Grace of her switching walk away from me

  Fastens me where I stop now, smiling pain;

  And neither pride don nor the fever shed

  More, till the furor when we slide to bed,

  Trying calenture for the raving brain.

  [ 40 ]

  Marble nor monuments whereof then we spoke

&
nbsp; We speak of more; spasmodic as the wasp

  About my windowpane, our short songs rasp—

  Not those alone before their singers choke—

  Our sweetest; none hopes now with one smart stroke

  Or whittling years to crack away the hasp

  Across the ticking future; all our grasp

  Cannot beyond the butt secure its smoke.

  A Renaissance fashion, not to be recalled.

  We dinch ‘eternal numbers’ and go out.

  We understand exactly what we are.

  . . Do we? Argent I craft you as the star

  Of flower-shut evening: who stays on to doubt

  I sang true? ganger with trobador and scald!

  [ 41 ]

  And Plough-month peters out . . its thermal power

  Squandered in sighs and poems and hopeless thought,

  Which corn and honey, wine, soap, wax, oil ought

  Upon my farmling to have chivvied into flower.

  I burn, not silly with remorse, in sour

  Flat heat of the dying month I stretch out taut:

  Twenty-four dawns the topaz woman wrought

  To smile to me is gone. These days devour

  Memory: what were you elbowed on your side?

  Supine, your knee flexed? do I hear your words

  Faint as a nixe, in our grove, saying farewells? . .

  At five I get up sleepless to decide

  What I will not today do; ride out: hear birds

  Antiphonal at the dayspring, and nothing else.

  [ 42 ]

  The clots of age, grovel and palsy, crave

  Mádmen: to gasp, unreasonably weep,

  Gravid with ice, staving invincible sleep. . .

  Still as I watch this two tonight I waive

  Half of my fear, envy sues even: grave,

  Easy and light with juniors, he, and steep

  In his honours she, beloved, wholly they keep

  Together, accustomed; hircine excitement gave

  No joy so deep, and died . . Fill my eyes with tears,

  I stare down the intolerable years

  To the mild survival—where, you are where, where?