Delusions, Etc., Page 2
John Berryman
to stay out in front.’ So may I run for You,
less laggard lately, less deluded man
of oxblood expectation
with fiery little resiny aftertastes.
Heard sapphire flutings. The winter will end. I remember You.
The sky was red. My pillow’s cold & blanched.
There are no fair bells in this city. This fireless house
lies down at Your disposal as usual! Amen!
II
Washington in Love
I
Rectitude, and the terrible upstanding member
II
The music of our musketry is: beautiful
III
Intolerable Sally, loved in vain
IV
Mr Adams of Massachusetts … I accept, gentlemen.
V
Aloes. Adders. Roman gratitude.
VI
My porch elevation from the Potomac is 174′, 7½″.
VII
Bring the wounded, Martha! Bring the wounded, men.
Beethoven Triumphant
1
DOOMS menace from tumults. Who’s immune
among our mightier of headed men?
Chary with his loins
womanward, he begot us an enigma.
2
Often pretended he was absentminded
whenas he couldn’t hear; and often was.
‘… always he, he everywhere, as one says of Napoleon’
(Sir John Russell in ’21 hearing a Trio)
3
O migratory rooms, the unworthy brothers, the worthless
nephew!
One time his landlord tipped a hat to him;
Beethoven moved. Awkward & plangent
charged to the Archduke’s foot,—who told his court ‘Leave him
alone.’
4
My unpretending love’s the B flat major
by the old Budapest done. Schnabel did record
the Diabelli varia. I can’t get a copy.
Then there’s Casals I have, 101, both parts.
5
Moments are, early on in the 4th Piano Concerto
show him at his unrivalled middle best.
It does go up and up, and down lingeringly.
Miser & Timon-giving, by queer turns.
6
They wanted him London, partout. ‘Too late,’ ‘Too late’
he muttered, and mimicked piano-playing.
Prodigious, so he never knew his age
his father’d lied about.
7
Whatever his kindness to Rossini and contempt for Italians,
if down he sat a while in an exquisite chair
it had to be thrown out (five witnesses,
none of whom says quite why).
8
O did he sleep sound? Heavy, heavy that.
Waked at 3:30 not by some sonata
but by a botched rehearsal of the Eighth
where all thing has to go right
(Koussevitzky will make it, Master; lie back down)
9
Lies of his fluency from Betty von Arnim
to eager Goethe, who’d not met the man.
Fact is, he stumbled at the start
and in the sequence, stumbled in the middle,
10
Often unsure at the end—shown by his wilderness
on-sketchings encrusted like Tolstoy (not Mozart:
who’d, ripping napkins, the whole strict in mind
before notes serried; limitationless, unlike you).
11
Inundations out from ground zero.
Back from an over-wealth, the simplification of Necessity.
When brother Johann signed ‘Real Estate Owner,’ you: ‘Brain
owner.’
And what, among fumbling notes, in the nights, did you read?
12
Coffee and tallow spot your Odyssey
though, and when Schindler was an arse to ask
your drift in Opus 31 and the Appassionata
you uttered at him, cheerful, ‘Just read The Tempest.’
13
Thinking presides, some think now,—only presides—
at the debate of the Instincts; but presides,
over powers, over love, hurt-back.
You grumbled: ‘Religion and Figured Bass are closed concepts.
Don’t argue.’
14
To disabuse the ‘Heiligerdankgesang’?
Men up to now sometimes weep openly.
Tortured your surly star to sing impossibly
against the whole (small) thwarting orchestra.
One chord thrusts, as it must
15
find allies, foes, resolve, in subdued crescendo.
Unfazed, you built-in the improbable.
You clowned. You made throats swallow
and shivered the backs of necks.
You made quiver with glee, at will; not long.
This world is of male energy male pain.
16
Softnesses, also yours, which become us.
What stayed your chosen instrument? The ’cello?
At two points. At others, the forte-piano.
At others, the fiddles & viola & ’cello.
17
I’m hard to you, odd nights. I bulge my brain,
my shut chest already suffers,—so I play blues
and Haydn whom you—both the which touch but they don’t
ache me.
I’m less inured in your disaster corner,
Master. You interfere.
O yes we interfere
or we’re mere sweetening: what? the alkali lives
around and after ours. Sleeking down nerves
Passing time dreaming. And you did do that too.
There hover Things cannot be banned by you;
damned few.
If we take our head in our ears and listen
Ears! Ears! the Devil paddled in you
18
heard not a hill flute or a shepherd sing!
tensing your vision onto an alarm
of gravid measures, sequent to demure,
all we fall, absently foreknowing.
You force a blurt: Who was I?
Am I these tutti, am I this rallentando?
This entrance of the oboe?
I am all these
the sane man makes reply on the locked ward.
19
Did ever you more than (clearly) cope odd women?
save clumsy uncommitted overtures
au moins à Joséphine? save the world-famous unsent
or when retrieved and past-death-treasured letter?
20
Deception spared. No doubt he took one look:
‘Not mine; I can’t make a kroner there.’
Straightforward staves, dark bars,
late motions toward the illegible. Musical thighs,
21
spared deep age. Out at prime, in a storm
inaudible thunder he went, upon his height.
The other day I called our chief prose-writer
at home a thousand miles off and began
‘How are you, Sir?’ out of three decades’ amity
22
‘I’m OLD,’ he said. Neither of us laughed.
Spared deep age, Beethoven. I wish you’d caught
young Schubert’s last chamberworks and the Winterreise
you could have read through, puffing.
23
Ah but the indignities you flew free from,
your self-abasements even would increase
together with your temper, evil already,
‘some person of bad character, churlish & eccentric’
For refusing to scribble a word of introduction:
‘He is an unlicked bear’—almost Sam Johnson.
24
An entertainer, a Molière, in the onset
under too
nearly Mozart’s aegis,
the mysteries of Oedipus old were not beyond you.
Islands of suffering & disenchantment & enchantment.
25
But the brother charged the dying brother board & lodging.
Bedbugs biting, stench, unquenchable thirst,
ungovernable swelling. Then the great Malfatti
gave up on, and accorded frozen punch ad lib.
26
Your body-filth flowed on to the middle of the floor
‘I shall, no doubt, soon be going above’
sweat beading you, gasping of Shakespeare,
knocking over the picture of Haydn’s birthplace.
27
They said you died. ‘20,000 persons of every class
clashed at the gates of the house of mourning, till they locked
them.
Franz Schubert stalked the five hundred feet to the church.
It’s a lie! You’re all over my wall!
You march and chant around here! I hear your thighs.
Your Birthday in Wisconsin You Are 140
‘ONE of the wits of the school’ your chum would say—
Hot diggity!— What the hell went wrong for you,
Miss Emily,—besides the ‘pure & terrible’ Congressman
your paralyzing papa,—and Mr Humphrey’s dying
& Benjamin’s the other reader? …
Fantastic at 32 outpour, uproar, ‘terror
since September, I could tell to none’
after your ‘Master’ moved his family West
and timidly to Mr Higginson:
‘say if my verse is alive.’
Now you wore only white, now you did not appear,
till frantic 50 when you hurled your heart
down before Otis, who would none of it
thro’ five years for ‘Squire Dickinson’s cracked daughter’
awful by months, by hours …
Well. Thursday afternoon, I’m in W—————
drinking your ditties, and (dear) they are alive,—
more so than (bless her) Mrs F who teaches
farmers’ red daughters & their beaux my ditties
and yours & yours & yours!
Hot diggity!
Drugs Alcohol Little Sister
(1887–1914)
WHEN I peered out, he had nine nights to spare
after his gun was man-handled from him
while the dying in his care
mountained and the weakened mind gave way.
So far off to my flatland flew no moan
who’d fail to focus yet for silly weeks.
I shoot him, though, a fellow agony
then I could hardly coo now I must speak
(back from this schwartze Verwesung whose white arms
lean subtle over ivories & blacks
and I am sweating, her blind scent subdues
ordure & the hiss of souls escaping)
for let us not all together in such pain
dumb apart pale into oblivion—no!
Trakl, con the male nurse.
Surmounted by carrion, cry out and overdose & go.
In Memoriam (1914-1953)
I
TOOK my leave (last) five times before the end
and even past these precautions lost the end.
Oh, I was highlone in the corridor
fifteen feet from his bed
where no other hovered, nurse or staff or friend,
and only the terrible breathing ever took place,
but trembling nearer after some small time
I came on the tent collapsed
and silence—O unable to say when.
I stopped panicked a nurse, she a doctor
in twenty seconds, he pulled the plasticine,
bent over, and shook his head at me.
Tubes all over, useless versus coma,
on the third day his principal physician
told me to pray he’d die, brain damage such.
His bare stub feet stuck out.
II
So much for the age’s prodigy, born one day
before I surfaced—when this fact emerged
Dylan grew stuffy and would puff all up
rearing his head back and roar
‘A little more—more—respect there, Berryman!’
Ah he had that,—so far ahead of me,
I half-adored him for his intricate booms & indecent tales
almost entirely untrue.
Scorn bottomless for elders: we were twenty-three
but Yeats I worshipped: he was amused by this,
all day the day set for my tea with the Great Man
he plotted to turn me up drunk.
Downing me daily at shove-ha’penny
with English on the thing. C——— would slump there
plump as a lump for hours, my word how that changed!
Hard on her widowhood—
III
Apart a dozen years, sober in Seattle
‘After many a summer’ he intoned
putting out a fat hand. We shook hands.
How very shook to see him.
His talk, one told me, clung latterly to Eden,
again & again of the Garden & the Garden’s flowers,
not ever the Creator, only of that creation
with a radiant will to go there.
I have sat hard for twenty years on this
mid potpals’ yapping, and O I sit still still
though I quit crying that same afternoon
of the winter of his going.
Scribbled me once, it’s around somewhere or other,
word of their ‘Edna Millay cottage’ at Laugharne
saying come down to and disarm a while
and down a many few.
O down a many few, old friend,
and down a many few.
III
Gislebertus’ Eve
Most men are not wicked … They
are sleep-walkers, not evildoers.
KAFKA TO G JANOUCH
EVE & her envy roving slammed me down
prone in discrepancy: I can’t get things right:
the passion for secrets the passion worst of all,
the ultimate human, from Leonardo & Darwin
to the austere Viennese with the cigar
and Bohr a-musing: ‘The opposite of a true
statement is a false statement. But the opposite
of a profound truth may be another profound truth.’
So now we see where we are, which is all-over
we’re nowhere, son, and suffering we know it,
rapt in delusion, where weird particles
frantic & Ditheletic orbit our
revolutionary natures. She snaked out a soft
small willing hand, curved her ivory fingers on
a new taste sensation, in reverie over
something other,
sank her teeth in, and offered him a bite.
I too find it delicious.
Scholars at the Orchid Pavilion
1
SOZZLED, Mo-tsu, after a silence, vouchsafed
a word alarming: ‘We must love them all!’
Affronted, the fathers jumped.
‘Yes’ he went madly on and waved in quest
of his own dreadful subject ‘O the fathers’
he cried ‘must not be all!’
Whereat upon consent we broke up for the day.
2
The bamboo’s bending power formed our theme
next dawn, under a splendid wind. The water
flapped to our tender gaze.
Girls came & crouched with tea. Great Wu pinched one,
forgetting his later nature. How the wind howled,
tranquil was our pavilion,
watching & reflecting, fingering bamboo.
3
‘Wild geese & bamboo’ muttered Ch’en Hung-shou
‘block out ou
r boundaries of fearful wind.
Neither requires shelter.
I shelter among painters, doing bamboo.
The young shoots unaffected by the wind
mock our love for their elders.’
Mo-tsu opened his mouth & closed it to again.
4
‘The bamboo of the Ten Halls’ went on Ch’en
‘of my time, are excellently made.
I cannot find so well
ensorcelled those of later or former time.
Let us apply the highest praise, pure wind,
to those surpassing masters;—
having done things, a thing, along that line myself.’
Tampa Stomp
THE first signs of the death of the boom came in the summer,
early, and everything went like snow in the sun.
Out of their office windows. There was miasma,
a weight beyond enduring, the city reeked of failure.
The eerie, faraway scream of a Florida panther,
gu-roomp of a bull-frog. One broker we knew
drunk-driving down from Tarpon Springs flew free
when it spiralled over & was dead without one mark on him.
The Lord fled that forlorn peninsula
of fine sunlight and millions of fishes & moccasins
& Spanish moss & the Cuban bit my father
bedded & would abandon Mother for.
Ah, an antiquity, a chatter of ghosts.
Half the fish now in half the time
since those blue days died. We’re running out
of time & fathers, sore, artless about it.
Old Man Goes South Again Alone
O PARAKEETS & avocets, O immortelles
& ibis, scarlet under that stunning sun,
deliciously & tired I come
toward you in orbit, Trinidad!—albeit without the one
I would bring with me to those isles & seas,
leaving her airborne westward thro’ great snows
whilst I lapse on your beaches
sandy with dancing, dark moist eyes among my toes.
The Handshake, The Entrance
‘YOU’VE got to cross that lonesome valley’ and
‘You’ve got to cross it by yourself.’
Ain’t no one gwine cross it for you,
You’ve got to cross it by yourself.
Some say John was a baptist, some say John was a Jew,
some say John was just a natural man
addin’ he’s a preacher too?
‘You’ve got to cross that lonesome valley,’
Friends & lovers, link you and depart.
This one is strictly for me.
