Berryman’s Sonnets (8 page)

The same thing happened once in Chaplin, how

He solved it now I lose.—Walk on the trash . .

Walk, softly, triste,—little is really gone.

[ 102 ]

A penny, pity, for the runaway ass!

A nickel for the killer’s twenty-six-mile ride!

Ice for the root rut-smouldering inside!

—Eight hundred weeks I have not run to Mass.—

Toss Jack a jawful of good August grass!

‘Soul awful,’ pray for a soul sometimes has cried!

Wire reasons he seasons should still abide!

—Hide all your arms where he is bound to pass.—

Who drew me first aside? her I forgive,

Or him, as I would be forgotten by

O be forgiven for salt bites I took.

Who drew me off last, willy-nilly, live

On (darling) free. If we meet, know me by

Your own exempt (I pray) and earthly look.

[ 103 ]

A ‘broken heart’ . . but
can
a heart break, now?

Lovers have stood bareheaded in love’s ‘storm’

Three thousand years, changed by their mistress’ ‘charm’,

Fitted their ‘torment’ to a passive bow,

Suffered the ‘darts’ under a knitted brow,

And has one heart
broken
for all this ‘harm’?

An arm is something definite. My arm

Is acting—I hardly know to tell you how.

It aches . . well, after fifteen minutes of

Serving, I can’t serve more, it’s not my arm,

A piece of pain joined to me, helpless dumb thing.

After four months of work-destroying love

(An hour, I still don’t lift it: I feel real alarm:

Weeks of this,—no doctor finds a thing),

       not much; and not all. Still, this is something.

[ 104 ]

A spot of poontang on a five-foot piece,

Diminutive, but room
enough
. . like clay

To finger eager on some torrid day . .

Who’d throw her black hair back, and hang, and tease.

Never, not once in all one’s horny lease

To have had a demi-lay, a pretty, gay,

Snug, slim and supple-breasted girl for play . .

She bats her big, warm eyes, and slides like grease.

And cuff her silly-hot again, mouth hot

And wet her small round writhing—but this screams

Suddenly awake, unreal as alkahest,

My God, this isn’t what I
want!
—You tot

The harrow-days you hold me to, black dreams,

The dirty water to get off my chest.

[ 105 ]

Three, almost, now into the ass’s years,

When hard on burden burden galls my back,

I carry corn feeds others, only crack

Cudgels, kicks on me, mountainous arrears

Worsen—avulse my fiery shirt!—The spheres

May sing with pain, I grieve knee-down, I slack

Deeper in evil . . love’s demoniac

Jerguer, who frisked me, hops aside and jeers.

The dog’s and monkey’s years—pot’s residue,

Growling and toothless, giggling, grimacing—

I hope to miss. Who in my child could see

The adulter and bizarre of thirty-two?—

But I will seem more silent soon . . mire-king.

Time, time that damns, disvexes. Unman me.

[ 106 ]

Began with swirling, blind, unstilled oh still,—

The tide had set in toward the western door

And I was working with the tide, I bore

My panful of reflexion firm, until

A voice arrested me,—body, and will,

And panful, wheeled and spilt, tempted nerves tore,

And all uncome time blackened like the core

Of an apple on through man’s heart moving still . .

At nine o’clock and thirty Thursday night,

In Nineteen XXXX, February

Twice-ten-day, by a doorway in McIntosh,

So quietly neither the rip’s cold slosh

Nor the meshing of great wheels warned me, unwary,

An enigmatic girl smiled out my sight.

[ 107 ]

Darling I wait O in my upstairs box

O for your footfall, O for your footfáll

in the extreme heat—I don’t mind at all,

it’s silence has me and the no of clocks

keeping us isolated longer: rocks

did the first martyr and will do to stall

our enemies, I’ll get up on the roof of the hall

and heave freely. The University of Soft Knocks

will headlines in the
Times
make: Fellow goes mad,

crowd panics, rhododendrons injured. Slow

will flow the obituaries while the facts get straight,

almost straight. He was in love and he was had.

That was it: he should have stuck to his own mate,

before he went a-coming across the sea-O.

[ 108 ]

I owe you, do I not, a roofer: though

My sister-
in
-law and her nephews stayed,

Not I stayed. O kind sister-outlaw, laid

Far off and legally four weeks, stoop low,

For my true thanks are fugitive also

Only to you;—stop off your cant, you jade,

Bend down,—
I
have not ever disobeyed

You; and you will hear what it is I owe.

I owe you thanks for evenings in that house

When . . neither here, nor there, no where, were you,

Nights like long knives; . .
two
letters! . . times when your voice

Nearly I latched. Another debit to

Your kinder husband. From the country of Choice

Another province chopt,—and they were few.

[ 109 ]

Ménage à trois, like Tristan’s,—difficult! . .

The convalescent Count; his mistress; fast

The wiry wild arthritic young fantast

In love with her, his genius occult,

His weakness blazing, ugly, an insult

A salutation; in his yacht they assed

Up and down the whole coast six months . . last

It couldn’t: . . the pair to Paris. Chaos, result.

Well—but four worse!! . . all four, marvellous friends—

Some horse-shit here, eh?—You admitted it,

Come, you did once . . and we
are friends,
I say.—

‘La Cuchiani aima Tristan, mais . .’

(The biographer says)
unscrupulous
a bit,

Or utterly … There, of course, the resemblance ends.

[ 110 ]

‘Ring us up when you want to see us . .’ —‘Sure,’

Said Moses to the SS woman, smil-

ing hopeless Moses.—Put her whip and file

Away and walked away, strip-murderer,

A svelte Lise, whistling … Knowing, it’s all
your

(Alas) initiation:
you
I can’t: while

We
are relationless, ‘us’?—Hail, chat: cant, heil!—

Hypocrite-perfect! hoping
I
endure.

A winter-shore is forming in my eye,

The widest river: down to it we dash,

In love, but I am naked, and shake; so,

Uncoloured-thick-oil clad, you nod and cry

Let’s go!’ . . white fuzzless limbs you razor flash,

And I am to follow the way you go.

27 August

[ 111 ]

Christian to Try: “I am so coxed in it,

All I can do is pull, pull without shame,

Backwards,—on the coxswain fall the fiery blame,

I slump free and exhausted.”—“Stop a bit,”

Try studied his sloe gin, “if you must fit

A trope so, you must hope to quit the game”

Pursued my brown friend with the plausible name

“Before your heart enlarging mucks you. Minute

By minute you pull faster.”—But I too

Am named, though lost . . you learn God’s will, give in,

After, whatever, you sit on, you sit.

Try “Quit” said “and be free.” I freeze to you

And I am free now of the fire of this sin

I choose . . I lose, yes . . but then I submit!

[ 112 ]

I break my pace now for a sonic boom,

the future’s with & in us. I sit fired

but comes on strong with the fire fatigue: I’m tired.

‘I’d drive my car across the living-room

if I could get it inside the house.’ You loom

less, less than before when your voice choired

into my transept hear I now it, not expired

but half-dead with exhaustion, like Mr Bloom.

Dazzle, before I abandon you, my eyes,

my eyes which I need for journeys difficult

in which case it may be said that I survive you.

Your voice continues, with its lows & highs,

and I am a willing accomplice in the cult

and every word that I     have gasped of you is true.

[ 113 ]

‘I didn’t see anyone else, I just saw Lise’

Anne Frank remorseful from the grave: ah well,

it was a vision of her mother in Hell,

a payment beforehand for rebellion’s seize,

whereby she grew up: springing from her knees

she saw her parents level. I ward your spell

away, and I try hard to look at you level

but that is quite unaccustomed to me, Lise.

Months I lookt up, entranced by you up there

like a Goya ceiling which will not come down,

in swirling clouds, until the end is here.

Tetélestai. We steamed in a freighter from Spain

& I will never see those frescoes again

nor need to, having memorized your cloudy gown.

[ 114 ]

You come blonde visiting through the black air

knocking on my hinged lawn-level window

and you will come for years, above, below,

& through to interrupt my study where

I’m sweating it out like asterisks: so there,—

you are the text, my work’s broken down so

I found, after my grandmother died, slow,

and I had flown far South to her funeral spare

but crowded with relations, I found her last

letter unopened, much less answered: shame

overcame me so far I paused & cried

in my underground study, for all the past

undone & never again to walk tall, lame

at the mercy of your presence to abide.

[ 115 ]

All we were going strong last night this time,

the
mots
were flying & the frozen daiquiris

were downing, supine on the floor lay Lise

listening to Schubert grievous & sublime,

my head was frantic with a following rime:

it was a good evening, an evening to please,

I kissed her in the kitchen—ecstasies—

among so much good we tamped down the crime.

The weather’s changing. This morning was cold,

as I made for the grove, without expectation,

some hundred Sonnets in my pocket, old,

to read her if she came. Presently the sun

yellowed the pines & my lady came not

in blue jeans & a sweater. I sat down & wrote.

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)

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)

The Heart Is Strange
(2014)

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 © 1952, 1967 by John Berryman

Copyright renewed © 1995 by Kate Berryman

Introduction copyright © 2014 by April Bernard

All rights reserved

Published in 1967 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

This paperback edition, 2014

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Paperback ISBN: 978-0-374-53454-7

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eISBN 9781466879621

First eBook Edition: September 2014