Berryman’s Sonnets (4 page)

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

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

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?

‘I
want
to take you for my lover’ just

You vowed when on the way I met you: must

Then that be all (
Do
) the shorn time we share?

[ 43 ]

You should be gone in winter, that Nature mourn

With me your anarch separation, call-

ing warmth all with you: as more poetical

Than to be left biting the dog-days, lorn

Alone when all else burgeons, brides are born,

Children yet (some) begotten, every wall

Clasped by its vine here . . crony alcohol

Comfort as random as the unicorn.

Listen, for poets are feigned to lie, and I

For you a liar am a thousand times,

Scars of these months blazon like a decree:

I would have you—a liner pulls the sky—

Trust when I mumble me. Than gin-&-limes

You are cooler, darling, O come back to me.

[ 44 ]

Bell to sore knees vestigial crowds, let crush

One another nations sottish and a-prowl,

Talon the Norway rat to a barn owl

At wind-soft midnight; split the sleepy hush

With sirens; card-hells create; from a tower push

The frantic hesitator; strike a rowel

To a sad nag; probe, while they whiten & howl,

With rubber gloves the prisoners’ genial slush;

Enact our hammer time; only from time

Twitch while the wind works my beloved and me

Once with indulgent tongs for a little free,—

Days, deer-fleet years, to be a paradigm

For runaways and the régime’s exiles.

. . The wind lifts, soon, the cold wind reconciles.

[ 45 ]

Boy twenty-one, in Donne, shied like a blow,—

His prose, from poems’ seductive dynamite,—

I read ‘The adulterer waits for the twilight . .

The twilight comes, and serves his turn.’ (Not so:

Midnight or dawn.) I stuttered frightened ‘No,

Nóne could decline, crookt, ghastly, from the sight