The Heart Is Strange: New Selected Poems Read online

  when I my friends’ homes visited, with fathers

  universal & intact.

  McGovern was critical: I treated my girl slight

  who was so kind to me I climbed in bed

  with her, with our pajamas, an icy morning

  when I’d stayed overnight

  by her mother’s kindness, flustered by my status,

  listening then downstairs.

  Tom took her over and I ceased to fear

  her nervous & carbuncled brother Thornton.

  Images of Elspeth

  O when I grunted, over lines and her,

  my Muse a nymphet & my girl with men

  older, of money, continually

  lawyers & so, myself a flat-broke Junior.

  But the one who made me wild

  was who she let take naked photographs

  never she showed me but she was proud of.

  Unnerving; dire.

  My love confused confused with after loves

  not ever over time did I outgrow.

  Solemn, alone my Muse grew taller.

  Rejection slips developed signatures,

  many thought Berryman was under weigh,

  he wasn’t sure himself.

  Elspeth became two snapshots in his keeping,

  with all her damned clothes on.

  She married a Law School dean & flourisheth.

  I almost married, with four languages

  a ballerina in London, and I should have done.

  —Drawing the curtain over fragrant scenes

  & interviews malodorous, find me

  domestic with my Muse

  who had manifested, well, a sense of humour

  fatal to bardic pretension.

  Dance! from Savannah Garnette with your slur

  hypnotic, you’ll stay many.

  I walked forth to a cold snow to post letters

  to a foreign editor & a West Coast critic

  wishing I could lay my old hands somewhere on those snapshots.

  Two Organs

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

  of the seven really good courses I ever took

  one was a seminar with Edman met at night

  in his apartment, where we read them all

  all the Dialogues, in chronological order, through

  so that I got something out of Columbia—

  Plato’s uterus, I say,

  an animal passionately longing for children

  and, if long unsatisfied after puberty,

  prone to range angrily, blocking the air passages

  & causing distress & disease.

  For ‘children’ read: big fat fresh original & characteristic poems.

  My longing yes was a woman’s

  She can’t know can she what kind of a baby

  she’s going with all the will in the world to produce?

  I suffered trouble over this,

  I didn’t want my next poem to be exactly like Yeats

  or exactly like Auden

  since in that case where the hell was I?

  but what instead did I want it to sound like?

  I couldn’t sleep at night, I attribute my life-long insomnia

  to my uterine struggles. ‘You must undress’

  a young poet writes to me from Oregon

  ‘the great face of the body.’

  The Isolation so, young & now I find older,

  American, & other.

  While the rest of England was strolling thro’ the Crystal Palace

  Arnold was gnashing his teeth on a mountain in Sicily.

  An eccentric friend, a Renaissance scholar, sixty-odd,

  unworldly, he writes limericks in Medieval Latin,

  stood up in the rowboat fishing to take a leak

  & exclaimed as he was about it with excitement

  ‘I wish my penis was big enough for this whole lake!’

  My phantasy precisely at twenty:

  to satisfy at once all Barnard & Smith

  & have enough left over for Miss Gibbs’s girls.

  Olympus

  In my serpentine researches

  I came on a book review in Poetry

  which began, with sublime assurance,

  a comprehensive air of majesty,

  ‘The art of poetry

  is amply distinguished from the manufacture of verse

  by the animating presence in the poetry

  of a fresh idiom: language

  so twisted & posed in a form

  that it not only expresses the matter in hand

  but adds to the stock of available reality.’

  I was never altogether the same man after that.

  I found this new Law-giver all unknown

  except in the back numbers of a Cambridge quarterly

  Hound & Horn, just defunct.

  I haunted on Sixth Avenue until

  at 15¢ apiece or 25

  I had all 28 numbers

  & had fired my followers at Philolexian & Boar’s Head

  with the merits of this prophet.

  My girls suffered during this month or so,

  so did my seminars & lectures &

  my poetry even. To be a critic, ah,

  how deeper & more scientific.

  I wrote & printed an essay on Yeats’s plays

  re-deploying all of Blackmur’s key terms

  & even his sentence-structure wherever I could.

  When he answered by hand from Boston my nervous invitation

  to come & be honoured at our annual Poetry Reading,

  it must have been ten minutes before I could open the envelope.

  I got him to review Tate’s book of essays

  & Mark to review The Double Agent. Olympus!

  I have travelled in some high company since

  but never so dizzily.

  I have had some rare girls since but never one so philosophical

  as that same Spring (my last Spring there) Jean Bennett.

  The Heroes

  For all his vehemence & hydraulic opinions

  Pound seemed feline, zeroing in on feelings,

  hovering up to them, putting his tongue in their ear,

  delicately modulating them in & out of each other.

  Almost supernatural crafter; maybe unhappy,

  disappointed continually,

  not fated like his protégé Tom or drunky Jim

  or hard-headed Willie for imperial sway.

  How I maneuvered in my mind their rôles

  of administration for the modern soul

  in English, now one, now ahead another,

  for this or that special strength, wilful & sovereign.

  I had, from my beginning, to adore heroes

  & I elected that they witness to,

  show forth, transfigure: life-suffering & pure heart

  & hardly definable but central weaknesses

  for which they were to be enthroned & forgiven by me.

  They had to come on like revolutionaries,

  enemies throughout to accident & chance,

  relentless travellers, long used to failure

  in tasks that but for them would sit like hanging judges

  on faithless & by no means up to it Man.

  Humility & complex pride their badges,

  every ‘third thought’ their grave.

  These gathering reflexions, against young women

  against seven courses in my final term,

  I couldn’t sculpt into my helpless verse yet.

  I wrote mostly about death.

  Recovery

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

  I was done in, mentally. I wrote nothing, I read nothing.

  I spent a pot of money, not being used to money,

  I forget on what, now. I felt dazed.

  After some wandering days in Montreal

  I went to a little town where Dr Locke

  cured any & everything with foot ‘adju
stments’,

  on hundreds of patients daily from all over North America

  outdoors in a hardwood grover in front of his clinic.

  I made vague friends with a couple, the brother in a wheel-chair,

  his pleasant sister looking after him.

  They were dull & very poor. I gave them tea,

  we talked about what young people talk about.

  Weeks somehow went by. All this time my art was in escrow,

  I vegetated, I didn’t even miss Jean,

  without interest in what I was, what I might become

  never came up, as day by day

  I stood in line for the Doctor & gave them tea.

  I didn’t think much of the nothing I knew of Canada,

  half British-oriented, half-French, half-American;

  no literature, painting, architecture,

  music, philosophy, scholarship …

  (McLuhan & Frye unthinkable ahead).

  I wasn’t unhappy, I wasn’t anything,

  until I pulled myself reluctantly together at last

  & bowed goodbye to my lame ducks

  & headed for Pier 42—where my nervous system

  as I teetered across the gang-plank

  sprang back into expectation. I kissed Jean

  & Mother & shook hands with old Halliday

  and I mounted to the Britannic’s topmost deck

  O a young American poet, not yet good,

  off to the strange Old World to pick their brains

  & visit by hook or crook with W. B. Yeats.

  Transit

  O a little lonely in Cambridge that first Fall

  of fogs & buying books & London on Thursday for plays

  & visiting Rylands in his posh rooms at King’s

  one late afternoon a week.

  He was kind to me stranded, & even to an evening party

  he invited me, where Keynes & Auden

  sat on the floor in the hubbub trading stories

  out of their Oxbridge wealth of folklore.

  I joined in desperation the Clare ping-pong team

  & was assigned to a Sikh in a bright yellow sweater

  with a beard so gorgeous I could hardly serve;

  his turban too won for him.

  I went to the Cosmo, which showed Continental films

  & for weeks only Marx Brothers films,

  & a short about Oxford was greeted one evening

  with loud cunning highly articulate disdain.

  Then I got into talk with Gordon Fraser

  & he took me home with him out to Mill Lane

  to meet his wife Katharine, a witty girl

  with strange eyes, from Chicago.

  The news from Spain got worse. The President of my Form

  at South Kent turned up at Clare, one of the last let out of Madrid.

  He designed the Chapel the School later built

  & killed himself, I never heard why

  or just how, it was something to do with a bridge.

  Message

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

  the other for the other, in my work;

  in verse & prose. Well, hell.

  I am not writing an autobiography-in-verse, my friends.

  Impressions, structures, tales, from Columbia in the Thirties

  & the Michaelmas term at Cambridge in ’36,

  followed by some later. It’s not my life.

  That’s occluded & lost.

  That consisted of lectures on St Paul,

  scrimmages with women, singular moments

  of getting certain things absolutely right.

  Laziness, liquor, bad dreams.

  That consisted of three wives & many friends,

  whims & emergencies, discoveries, losses.

  It’s been a long trip. Would I make it again?

  But once a Polish belle bared me out & was kind to it.

  I don’t remember why I sent this message.

  Children! children! form the point of all.

  Children & high art.

  Money in the bank is also something.

  We will all die, & the evidence

  is: Nothing after that.

  Honey, we don’t rejoin.

  The thing meanwhile, I suppose, is to be courageous & kind.

  The Minnesota 8 and the Letter-Writers

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

  signing itself & saying where it’s from:

  St Louis Park. Out of the woodwork vermin come.

  To crises rise our worst, and (some) our best

  to dare illegal deeds in an unpopular cause

  defying prison because they feel they ought, because

  the sanity & honour seem endangered,

  or seem convulsed, of their own country, and

  a flaccid people can’t be got to understand

  its state without some violence undertaken,

  by somebody without a thing to gain,

  to shock it into resisting,—one program pain

  of treatment back to the health of the body politic:

  to stop napalming pint-sized yellow men

  & their slant-eyed children, and ground arms & come home again.

  O the Signers broke the law, and deserved hanging,

  by the weird light of the sage of St Louis Park,

  who probably admires them. These bear their rare mark.

  Damned

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

  It must have been in a shuffle of disrobing

  or shortly after.

  I confess: I don’t know what to do.

  She wept steadily all thro’ the performance.

  As soon as I tucked it in she burst into tears.

  She had a small mustache but was otherwise gifted,

  riding, & crying her heart out.

  (She had been married two years) I was amazed.

  (Her first adultery) I was scared & guilty.

  I said ‘What are you crying for, darling? Don’t.’

  She stuttered something & wept on.

  She came again & again, twice ejecting me

  over her heaving. I turned my head aside

  to avoid her goddamned tears,

  getting in my beard.

  I am busy tired mad lonely & old.

  O this has been a long long night of wrest.

  I saw her once again: on a busy sidewalk

  outside a grocery store

  & she was big & I did not say ‘Is it mine?’

  I congratulated her.

  Brighter it waxeth; it’s almost seven.

  Despair

  It seems to be DARK all the time.

  I have difficulty walking.

  I can remember what to say to my seminar

  but I don’t know that I want to.

  I said in a Song once: I am unusually tired.

  I repeat that & increase it.

  I’m vomiting.

  I broke down today in the slow movement of K.365.

  I certainly don’t think I’ll last much longer.

  I wrote: ‘There may be horribles.’

  I increase that.

  (I think she took her little breasts away.)

  I am in love with my excellent baby.

  Crackles! in darkness HOPE; & disappears.

  Lost arts.

  Vanishings.

  Walt! We’re downstairs,

  even you don’t comfort me

  but I join your risk my dear friend & go with you.

  There are no matches

  Utter, His Father, one word

  The Hell Poem

  Hospital racket, nurses’ iron smiles.

  Jill & Eddie Jane are the souls.

  I like nearly all the rest of them too

  except when they feed me paraldehyde.

  Tyson has been here three heavy months;

  heroin. We have the same doctor: She’s improving,

  let out on
pass tonight for her first time.

  A madonna’s oval face with wide dark eyes.

  Everybody is jolly, patients, nurses,

  orderlies, some psychiatrists. Anguishes;

  gnawings. Protractions of return

  to the now desired but frightful outer world.

  Young Tyson hasn’t eaten since she came back.

  She went to a wedding, her mother harangued her

  it was all much too much for her

  she sipped wine with a girl-friend, she fled here.

  Many file down for shock & can’t say after

  whether they ate breakfast. Dazed till four.

  One word is: the memory will come back.

  Ah, weeks or months. Maybe.

  Behind the locked door, called ‘back there’,

  the worse victims.

  Apathy or ungovernable fear

  cause them not to watch through the window starlight.

  They can’t have matches, or telephone. They slob food.

  Tantrums, & the suicidal, are put back there.

  Sometimes one is promoted here. We are ecstatic.

  Sometimes one has to go back.

  It’s all girls this time. The elderly, the men,

  of my former stays have given way to girls,

  fourteen to forty, raucous, racing the halls,

  cursing their paramours & angry husbands.

  Nights of witches: I dreamt a headless child.

  Sobbings, a scream, a slam.

  Will day glow again to these tossers, and to me?

  I am staying days.

  Eleven Addresses to the Lord

  1

  Master of beauty, craftsman of the snowflake,

  inimitable contriver,

  endower of Earth so gorgeous & different from the boring Moon,

  thank you for such as it is my gift.

  I have made up a morning prayer to you

  containing with precision everything that most matters.

  ‘According to Thy will’ the thing begins.

  It took me off & on two days. It does not aim at eloquence.

  You have come to my rescue again & again

  in my impassable, sometimes despairing years.

  You have allowed my brilliant friends to destroy themselves

  and I am still here, severely damaged, but functioning.

  Unknowable, as I am unknown to my guinea pigs:

  how can I ‘love’ you?

  I only as far as gratitude & awe

  confidently & absolutely go.