fumbling & falsing in & out of the Bay of Pigs,
the bad moment of this excellent man,
suffered by me as a small car can.
Faithful to course we stayed.
V
Some in their places are constrained to weep.
Stunned, more, though.
Black foam. A weaving snake. An invulnerable sleep.
It doing have to come so.
All at once, hurtless, in the tide of applause
& expectation. I write from New York
where except for a paraplegic exterminator—
a gracious & sweet guy—
nobody has done no work
lately
VI
It’s odd perhaps that Dallas cannot after their crimes
criminals protect or Presidents.
Fat Dallas, a fit set.
I would not perhaps have voted for him next time.
Images of Mr Kennedy blue the air,
who is little now, with no chance to grow great,
but who have set his touch across the State,
true-intended, strong
VII
My breath comes heavy, does my breath.
I feel heavy about the President’s death.
VIII
I understand I hear I see I read
schoolgirls in Dallas when the white word came
or slammed, cheered in their thoughtful grades,
brought-up to a loving tone.
I do not sicken but somewhat with shame
I shift my head an inch; who are my own.
I have known a loving Texas woman in parades
and she was boastful & treacherous.
That boringest of words, whereas here I blush,
‘education’, peters to a nailing of us.
IX
An editor has asked me in my name
what wish or prophecy I’d like to state
for the new year. I am silent on these occasions
steadily, having no love for a fool
(which I keep being) but I break my rule:
I do all-wish the bullets swim astray
sent to the President, and that all around
help, and his heart keep sound.
I have a strange sense
he’s about to be the best of men.
Amen.
X
It’s quiet at Arlington. Rock Creek is quiet.
My prīmers, with Mount Auburn. Everybody should
have his sweet boneyards. Yet let the young not go,
our apprentice King! Alas,
muffled, he must. He seemed good:
brainy in riot, daring, cool.
So
let us abandon the scene of disorder. Drop
them shattered bodies into tranquil places,
where moulder as you will. We compose our faces
cold as the cresting waters; ready again.
The waters break.
All black & white together, stunned, survive
the final insolence to the head of you;
bow.
Overwhelmed-un, live.
A rifle fact is over, pistol facts
almost entirely are too.
The man of a wise face opened it to speak:
Let us continue.
LOVE & FAME
[1971]
TO THE MEMORY OF THE SUFFERING LOVER & YOUNG BRETON MASTER WHO CALLED HIMSELF ‘TRISTAN CORBIÈRE’
(I WISH I VERSED WITH HIS BITE)
Sleep! In your boat brought into the living-room
supreme admirer of the ancient sea
Your mockery of the pretentious great
your self-revelations
constitute still in any sunset sky
a cursing glory
Part One
Her & It
I fell in love with a girl.
O and a gash.
I’ll bet she now has seven lousy children.
(I’ve three myself, one being off the record.)
I wish she’d read my book & write to me
from O wherever ah how far she is.
After all, I get letters from anybody.
From hers, I’d tear to the ’phone.
It’s not now near at all the end of winter.
I have to fly off East to sing a poem.
I’ll keep an eye out for her.
My tough Songs well in Tokyo & Paris
fall under scrutiny. My publishers
very friendly in New York & London
forward me elephant cheques.
Time magazine yesterday slavered Saul’s ass,
they pecked at mine last year. We’re going strong!
Photographs all over!
She muttered something in my ear I’ve forgotten as we danced.
Cadenza on Garnette
‘If I had said out passions as they were,’
plain-saying Wordsworth confided down deep age,
‘the poems could never have been published.’
Ha! a confrère.
She set up a dazing clamour across this blood
in one of Brooks Hall’s little visiting rooms.
In blunt view of whoever might pass by
we fondled each other’s wonders.
One night she couldn’t come down, she had a cold,
so I took away a talkative friend of hers,
to squirrel together inklings as to Garnette,
any, no matter what, she did, said, was.
O it flowed fuller than the girl herself,
I feasted on Louise.
I all but fell in love with her instead,
so rich with news.
Allen long after, being taxed obscenely
in a news-sheet of Spoleto, international town,
complained to me next day: His aim was tell it all.
Poets! . . Lovers & secrets!
How did we break off, now I come to it,
I puzzle. Did she date somebody else
& I warred with that & she snapped ‘You don’t own me’
or did the flare just little by little fall?
so that I cut in & was cut in on,
the travelling spotlights coloured, the orchestra gay,
without emphasis finally,
pressing each other’s hand as he took over.
Shirley & Auden
O lithest Shirley! & the other worlds
She did not say anything definite; but I twigged
(a word I picked up later in Cambridge, England):
I would not make this one.
No indeed. Alas!
The most flamboyant fag on campus, P W,
frightened me one Socratic evening
by telling me that anybody
targeting all attention to the matter
can MAKE anybody—no bar sex or age
or modesty or toilet-training or marriage status.
He’d been thrown out of seven schools, & knew.
He once gave the homosexual howl
on 52nd Street to Noel Coward
himself, who rose up in the rear
of his open-top chauffeured limousine
& flinging their down-flaunt of the hand howled back.
I sometimes still (rarely) think of P W
& I wonder how his beauteous long blond hair
& heavy bright knit ties & camel’s-hair topcoat
are making out in this man’s world.
Also of G S, a crony of his,
also queer, who had written half a novel
called ‘Fish Out of Water’ & was a prominent fellow
among our gang on the Fourth Floor of John Jay
that ran the College.
An old-time novelist myself. At twelve
I wrote a half a science-fiction book
about a trip to Neptune & Ee-loro-a’ala
‘published’ by Helen Justice in two brown-wrappered volumes,
read
ership limited ah to the eighth grade
at P.S. 69 in Jackson Heights,
Long Island. She was pretty keen on me
but too tall for my then romantic image.
Besides I was being faithful to Charlotte Coquet
skating up & down in front of her blue house
passionate in the late afternoon barely to be noticed.
O Charlotte Coquet . .
I was political in my first year; very.
With Tom McGovern & Paul MacCutcheon
we founded an Independent Party
to break the syndicate of the fraternities.
I lost the trivial Vice-Presidency
to a combed void from Kent School, Alpha Delt,
by five bare bitter votes.
In two years we had a majority on Student Council.
I recognized Auden at once as a new master,
I was by then a bit completely with it.
My love for that odd man has never altered
thro’ some of his facile bodiless later books.
This place is done for, England & so on.
The poet mourns but clamps it to a symptom
fascinating, obscurely foreseeing
the hectic dancer of your delicious end.
O and Shakespeare seized his daring in both hands
to warn the star of the age, acclaiming but adding
something in a Chorus of Henry V
on ‘favourites,
made proud by Princes, that advance their pride
against that power that bred it.’
Nobody told the Earl, or if one did
it went unheeded,—from a poet? words
to menace action? O I don’t think so.
I wonder if Shakespeare trotted to the jostle of his death.
When I flew through The Orators first
I felt outstretched, like an archaeologist
Carl Blegen himself with his withered arm
I shook in Cincinnati at Nestor’s palace:
‘Woeisme’ (the Channing wail
of ladies young at that ladies’ school wailing poetry)
that anyone would put great Auden down.
I’d rather prove inadequate myself.
I vow I poured more thought that Fall into Auden
than into Shirley C
the preternatural dancer from Johnson Hall.
O lithest Shirley,—I wouldn’t be up to you now.
But darling, sister, do you yourself ever dance any more?
My heart quails as I put this unbearable question,—
into what faraway air?
Freshman Blues
My intense friend was tall & strongly made,
almost too handsome—& he was afraid
his penis was too small.
We mooted it, we did everything but examine it
whether in se or by comparison
to the great red joy a pecker ought to be
to pump a woman ragged. Only kid sisters,
he muttered, want to somersault with me.
Thought much I then on perforated daddy,
daddy boxed in & let down with strong straps,
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.
My Special Fate
I tore it open, by one end, & found
French prose translations, a French estimate.
I dreamt at times in those days of my name
blown by adoring winds all over
and once a postcard came from ‘Harold Spitz’
a gentleman in Brooklyn, running ‘Huh!
You like that stuff? It stinks.’
One of my first fan-letters.
She was eminent at Barnard.
We sat at the Dean’s table
during a prom, and I smiled on the Dean
thinking of her protégée’s naked photographs,
and shagging with a rangy gay thin girl
(Miss Vaughan) I tore a section of the draperies down.
I wore white buckskin shoes with tails sometimes
& was widely known on Morningside Heights,
a tireless & inventive dancing man.
I left a dance one night with one Clare Reese,
short & pretty, poor teeth, sensual;
we took the subway north to a waste ground
over the Hudson where we tumbled down
under a trembling moon.
Coarse kids collected to jeer down on us
struggling back up into bra, panties, trousers.
At all times loomed for me my special fate,
Elspeth’s haggard unsuccessful lover.
Drunks
One night in Albany
on a geology field-trip, in a corridor
upstairs of our hotel
I found McGovern on his hands & knees
heading for his lost room after a bet
which upright I had won.
I read everybody, borrowing their books from Mark,
it took me quite a while to get to Yeats.
I wondered every day about suicide.
Once at South Kent—maybe in the Third Form?—
I lay down on the tracks before a train
& had to be hauled off, the Headmaster was furious.
Once at a New Year’s party at Mark Van Doren’s
to which I took my Jane & H
cautioning them to behave themselves
the place was crawling with celebrities
poor H got stuck in an upstairs bedroom
with the blonde young wife of a famous critic
a wheel at one of the book clubs
who turned out to have nothing on under her gown
sprawled out half-drunk across her hostess’s bed
moaning ‘Put it in! Put it in!’
He was terrified.
I passed out & was put in that same bed.
Down & Back
It is supernal what a youth can take
& barely notice or be bothered by
which to him older would work ruin.
Over
Atherton I almost lost not only my mind
but my physical well-being!
night on night till 4 till 5 a.m.
intertangled breathless, sweating, on a verge
six or seven nerve-destroying hours
sometimes a foul dawn saw me totter home.
Mental my torment too all that fierce time
she ‘loved’ me; but she wouldn’t quite sleep with me
although each instant brought a burning chance
she suddenly might! O yes: it hung in the air
her living-room was thick with it like smoke
both of us smelt it
blood sludge from a martini
This was during vacation, then my God
she went back to Northampton
& only wrote once or twice a day
in that prize-winning penmanship
I went back to the world sore & chagrined
with a hanging head & no interest
in anything.
It was then I think I flunked my 18th Century
I wrote a strong exam, but since it was Mark
a personal friend, I had to add a note
saying of the 42 books in the bloody course
I’d only read 17.
He liked my candour
(he wrote) & had enjoyed the exam
but had no option except to give me F in the course—
costing my scholarship. The Dean was nice
but thought the College & I should part company
at least for a term, to give me ‘time to think’
& regroup my forces (if I’d any left).
A jolt. And almost worse, I had let Mark down.
I set about to fix the second thing.
I paged the whole century through for five monk’s months
keeping an encyclopedic notebook.
I made among other things an abridgement of Locke’s Essay
down to some hundred pages
preserving all his points & skeleton
but chopping away superfluous exposition.
Mark thought it ought to be published
but we found out there was one in print already.
Anyway he changed my grade retroactively & talked to the Dean.
My scholarship was restored, the Prodigal Son
welcomed with crimson joy.
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