Berryman’s Sonnets (7 page)

Seats 37, 12 Standees, I am tired

Unspeakably of standing: Kiss me, and let

Let me sit down and take you in my arms.

[ 83 ]

Impossible to speak to her, and worse

To keep on silent, silent hypocrite

Bound for my kindness or my lack of it

Solely to strength you crumple or you nurse

By not being or being with me. Curse

This kindness tricks her to think bit by bit

We
will
be more together . . better . . sit

The poor time out, and then the good rehearse—

When neither my fondness nor my pity can

O no more bend me to Esther with love,

Gladden the sad eyes my lost eyes have seen

With such and so long ache, ah to unman.

When she calls, small, and grieving I must move,

The horror and beauty of your eyes burn between.

[ 84 ]

I wished, all the mild days of middle March

This special year, your blond good-nature might

(Lady) admit—kicking abruptly tight

With will and affection down your breast like starch—

Me to your story, in Spring, and stretch, and arch.

But who not flanks the wells of uncanny light

Sudden in bright sand towering? A bone sunned white.

Considering travellers bypass these and parch.

This came to less yes than an ice cream cone

Let stand . . though still my sense of it is brisk:

Blond silky cream, sweet cold, aches: a door shut.

Errors of order! Luck lies with the bone,

Who rushed (and rests) to meet your small mouth, risk

Your teeth irregular and passionate.

[ 85 ]

Spendthrift Urethra—Sphincter, frugal one—

Masters from darkness in your double sway

Whom favouring either all chaotic stray—

Adjust us to our love! . .
Unlust
undone,

Wave us together out of the running sun

Suddenly, and rapt from our shore-play,

My loss your consolation and protégé,

Down at a stroke whelmed, while the waters run.

O serious as our play, my nervous plea!

. . Hallucinatory return to the warm and real

Dark, still, happy apartment after the riot . .

Wounded, be well, and sleep sound as the sea

Vexed in wide night by no wind, but the wheel

Roils down to zero . . steady . . archaic quiet.

[ 86 ]

Our lives before bitterly our mistake!—

We should have been together seething years,

We should have been the tomb-bat hangs and hears

Sounds inconceivable, been a new snowflake,

We should have been the senile world’s one sake,

Vestigial lovers, tropical and fierce

Among fatigues and snows, the gangs and queers,

We should have been the bloom of a cockcrow lake.

. . A child’s moon, child’s fire!—What I love of you

Inter alia
tingles like a whole good day,

A hard wind, or a Strad’s consummate pluck,

Proficient, full and strong, shrewd as the blue

Profound sky, pale as a winter sky you lay

And with these breasts whiter than stars gave suck.

[ 87 ]

Is it possible, poor kids, you must not come out?

Care for you none but Lise, to whom you cry?

Here in my small book must you dance, then die?

Rain nor sun greet you first, no friendly shout?

If the army stands, moves not ahead one scout?

Sits all your army ever still, small fry?

And never to all your letters one reply?

No echo back, your games go on without?

Dignity under these conditions few

I feel might muster steadily, and you

Jitterbug more than you pavanne, poor dears . .

Only you seem to want to hunt the whole

House through, scrutators of the difficult soul

Native here—and pomp’s not for pioneers.

[ 88 ]

Anomalous I linger, and ignore

My blue conviction she will now not come

Whose grey eyes blur before me like some sum

A shifting riddle to fatigue . . I pore . .

Faster they flicker, and flag, moving on slower,

And I move with them—who am I? a scum

Thickens on a victim, a delirium

Begins to mutter, which I must explore.

O rapt as Monteverdi’s
‘. . note . . note . .’

I glide aroused—a rumour? or a dream?

An actual lover? Elmo’s light? erlking?

—‘I know very well who I am’ said Don Quixote.

The sourceless lightning laps my stare, the stream

Backs through the wood, the cosy spiders cling.

[ 89 ]

‘If long enough I sit here, she, she’ll pass.’

This fatuous, and suffering-inversion,

And Donne-mimetic, O and true assertion

Tolls through my hypnagogic mind; alas

I hang upon this threshold of plate-glass,

Dry and dull eyes, in the same weird excursion

As from myself our love-months are, some Persian

Or Aztec supersession—the land mass

Extruded first from the archaic sea,

Whereon a desiccation, and species died

Except the one somehow learnt to breathe air:

Unless my lungs adapt me to despair,

I’ll nod off into the increasing, wide,

Marvellous sleep my hope lets herald me.

[ 90 ]

For you an idyl, was it not, so far,

Flowing and inconvulsive pastoral,

I suddenly made out tonight as, all

The pallor of your face lost like a star,

It clenched and darkened in your avatar,

The goddess grounded. Lovers’ griefs appal

Women, who with their honey brook their gall

And succor as they can the men they mar.

Down-soft my joy in the beginning, O

Dawn-disenchanted since, I hardly remember

The useful urine-retentive years I sped.

—I said as little as I could, sick; know

Your strange heart works; wish us into September

Only alive, and lovers, and abed.

[ 91 ]

Itself a lightning-flash ripping the ‘dark

Backward’ of you-before, you harrowed me

How you and the wild boy (larcener-to-be)

Took horses out one night, full in the stark

Pre-storm midnight blackness, for a lark,

At seventeen, drunk, and you whipt them madly

About the gulph’s rim, lightning-split, with glee

About, about. A decade: . . I embark.

How can we know with whom we ride, or soon

Or later, ever? You . . what are yóu like?

A topic’s occupied me months, month’s mind.

But I more startled may, than who shrank down

And wiped his sharp eyes with a helpless look,

The great tears falling, when Odysseus struck him, find.

[ 92 ]

What can to you this music wakes my years

(I work you here a wistful specimen)

Be, to you affable and supple, when

The music they call music fills your ears?

Room still? Alive O to my animals’ tears?

Haunted by cagy sighs? The cries of men

Versed are you in? Your Tetragrammaton—

Bach, Mozart, Beethoven & Schubert—hears.

No quarrel here once! Pindar sang both sides,—

Two thousand years their easy marriage lasted,

Until some coldness grew . . they moved apart . .

Only one now to rile the other rides

Sometimes, neither will say how he has fasted,

They stare with desire, and spar . . and crib . . and part.

[ 93 ]

The man who made her let me climb the derrick

At nine (not far from—four—another child)

Produced this steady daring keeps us wild . .

I remember the wind wound on me like a lyric.

One resignation on to more, some cleric

Has told us, helms, would make the Devil mild

At last; one boldness so in the spirit filed

Brings boldness on—collective—atmospheric—

Character in the end, contented on a slope

Brakeless, a nervy ledge . . we overgrow

My derrick into midnights and high dawn,

The riot where I’m happy—still I hope

Sometime to dine with you, sometime to go

Sober to bed, a proper citizen.

[ 94 ]

Most strange, my change, this nervous interim.—

The utter courtship ended, tokens won,

Assurance salted down . . all this to stun

More than excite: I blink about me grim

And dull and anxious, rather than I skim

Light bright & confident: like a weak pun

I stumble neither way: Hope weighs a ton:

Tired certainly, but much less tired than dim.

—I were absence’ adept, a glaring eye;

Or I were agile to this joy, this letter,

You say from Fox Hill:
‘I am not the same.’
—

No more am I: I’m neither: without you I

Am not myself. My sight is dying. Better

The searchlights’ torture which we overcame!

[ 95 ]

‘Old Smoky’ when you sing with Peter, Lise,

Sometimes at night, and your small voices hover

Mother-and-son but sourceless, O yours over

The hesitating treble must be his,

I glide about my metamorphosis

Gently, a tryst of troubled joy—discover

Our pine-grove grown a mountain—the
true
lover

Soft as a flower, hummingbird-piercing, is.

I saw him stretch out farther than a wish

And I have seen him gutted like a fish

At hipshot midnight for you, by your side.—

Last night there in your love-seat, you away,

I sang low to my niece your song, and stray

Still from myself into you singing slide.

[ 96 ]

It will seem strange, no more this range on range

Of opening hopes and happenings. Strange to be

One’s
name
no longer. Not caught up, not free.

Strange, not to wish one’s wishes onward. Strange,

The looseness, slopping, time and space estrange.

Strangest, and sad as a blind child, not to see

Ever you, never to hear you, endlessly

Neither you there, nor coming . . Heavy change!—

An instant there is, Sophoclean, true,

When Oedipus must understand: his head—

When Oedipus
believes!
—tilts like a wave,

And will not break, only
ἰού ἰού

Wells from his dreadful mouth, the love he led:

Prolong to Procyon this. This begins my grave.

[ 97 ]

I say
I laid siege—you enchanted me . .

Magic and warfare, faithful metaphors

As when their paleolithic woods and tors

The hunter and the witchwife roamed, half free,

Half to the Provider and the Mystery-

riddler bound: the kill, the spell: your languors

I wag my wolf’s tail to—without remorse?—

You shudder as I’d pierce you where I knee

I . . Only we little wished, or you to charm

Or I to make you shudder, you to wreck

Or I to hum you daring on my arm.

Abrupt as a dogfight, the air full of

Tails and teeth—the meshing of a trek—

All this began: knock-down-and-drag-out love.

[ 98 ]

Mallarmé siren upside down,—rootedly!

Dare the top crotch, the utmost two limbs plume

Cloudward, the bole swells just below . . See, from

Her all these leaves and branches! . . world-green . . free

To be herself: firm-subtle-grey-brown barky,

A skin upon her gravest thought: to roam,

Sea-disinclined . . through the round stair I come,

A hollow. Board loose down near your rooftree.

. . I biked out leisurely one day because

My heart was breaking, and swung up with the casual

Passion of May again your sycamore . .

Hand trembling on the top, everything was

Beautiful, inhuman, green and real as usual.—

Your hypocrite hangs on the truth, sea-sore.

[ 99 ]

A murmuration of the shallow, Crane

Sees us, or so, twittering at nightfall

About the eaves, coloured and houseless soul,

Before the mucksweat rising of the Wain.

No black or white here; and our given brain

Troubles us incompletely; if we call

Sometimes to one another, if we fall

Sorry, we soon forget; wing’d, but in vain.

He fell in love once, when upon her
arms

He concentrated what I call his faith . .

He died, and dropt into a Jersey hole,

A generation of our culture’s swarms

Accumulated honey for your wraith—

Does his wraith watch?—ash-blond and candid soul!

[ 100 ]

I am interested alone in making ready,

Pointed, more splendid, O the Action which

Attends your whim; bridge interim; enrich

That unimaginable-still, with study

So sharp at time the probe shivers back bloody;

Test the strange circuit but to trust the switch.

The Muse is real, the random shades I stitch—

Devoted vicarage—somewhere real, and steady.

Burnt cork, my leer, my Groucho crouch and rush,

No more my nature than Cyrano’s: we

Are ‘hindered characters’ and mock the time,

The curving and incomprehensible hush

Einstein requires before that colloquy

Altared of joy concludes our pantomime!

[ 101 ]

Because I’d seen you not believe your lover,

Because you scouted cries come from no cliff,

Because to supplications you were stiff

As Ciro, O as Nero to discover

Slow how your subject loved you, I would hover

Between the slave and rebel—till this life

Arrives: ‘. . was astonished as I would be if

I leaned against a house and the house fell over . .’

Well, it fell over, over: trust him now:

A stronger house than looked—
you leaned,
and crash,

My walls and ceiling were to be walked on.—